As I upgraded my personal blog to WordPress 2.0 today, I noticed that WordPress now bundles a new anti-spam plugin called Akismet.  Akismet is a new web service that promises to can comment and trackback spam.  It's run by Matt Mullenweg, who also is the creator of WordPress.  (How convenient!) 

Akismet is free for personal/non-commercial use ($2200/year for enterprise use) and requires a Wordpress.com API key.  Looks pretty neat.  There already two Python wrappers for it.

I'm thinking that turning one of these Python implementations into a Plone product would be hugely useful for folks (like me) who want to open up comments on a Plone blog to non-registered users, perhaps by using a product like VisitorComments, or any of several blogging products.  When Tim Hicks' plonetrackback product finally pushes through to release, providing site-wide trackback functionality for Plone sites, solid spam protection is going to be even more important, even if you're not running a blog yourself. 

Some might object that nobody should run a site that allows comments by anonymous users, and that trackback is obsolete and thus not worth supporting.  I'm not without some sympathy to those lines of reasoning.   But I think that there are valid use cases for commenting by unregistered users -- requiring registration puts up a barrier to that initial burst of participation in a comment thread, and for some sites, that failure to snare "drive-by" visitors can be a killer.  And I think that trackback, while not used very consistent, can be very helpful in building cross-site links between conversations.  (It would be helped tremendously if there was consistent use of an trackback spam solution, too!)

It's also true that there are few comment spammers targeting Plone right now.  All the more reason to get out in front of the problem by putting together a solid defense now.

Just a thought for those of you interested in Plone's blogging features.