I have a bad habit of getting caught up in side projects – I love to build stuff, and open see opportunities to engage in this hobby. A site I’ve run for a while is the Linux Incompatibility List, which also led me to create my own Rails based wiki for it, DedaWiki, which is of course open source (and could use some more attention).

However, things are getting badly on the spam front, and it’s time to find a better solution than hacking at my own anti-spam code. Two systems that look good are Akismet, which I use successfully for this journal, and Defensio. However, being the impractical guy that I am, I am also curious if there are what we might call ‘open source’ efforts in this area. I’m not sure what that would look like, since there’s probably strength in numbers, and a hosted solution is certainly easier. Also, it seems the incentives in an arms race like anti-spam are in favor of the quick turnaround that a small, smart, dedicated team can provide. Also… a bit of security through obscurity in an arms race type situation probably doesn’t hurt, since there’s often going to be a way around anything that’s not locked down (and part of the value of a journal like this is in the comments), and letting people see exactly what numbers and ratios and metrics are being used is going to help the bad guys.

Anyone able to point me to something that proves me wrong?