dreadedmonkeygod . net

I took a look at the Akismet code, and discovered that if it can't contact Akismet's server, it assumes that the comment in question is not spam. I find this troublesome.

If there's a problem (in this case, specifically an IOException), I want to know about it. Don't just hand me a boolean and hope everything goes well from there. I'd love to see an Exception thrown letting me know that perhaps this comment should receive special treatment.

Maybe I'll re-write the Akismet code to do just that. But for now, if Akismet's client code can't reach the server, the comment is marked as spam. Given that I receive 400 spam messages a day and maybe 3 real comments, that seems like the way to go.

I see why Akismit is coded this way: they wanted to provide a super-simple interface, so they didn't want to throw Exceptions. And they didn't want comments to be completely locked out in the event of a network issue, so they defaulted to "not spam". I've tweaked things in a way that makes sense for my site, which gets very little traffic, very few comment submissions, and has fairly reliable network connectivity.

And I'm taking some time this weekend to relax, so maybe I'll spend some of that time building a better comment moderation queue.