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I had noticed a considerable slowdown in this blog sometime ago and had not been able to track down the cause for this slowdown. I had tried a variety of different things including breaking down the database into small portions and the code into more sizeable chunks to try and isolate what was causing the slowdown (including all kinds of optimization/repair techniques).

I remembered this morning that I had installed Spam Karma to test it and had since uninstalled it. However, I had not realized that Spam Karma had created a fulltext index of the comments table and I had not removed that index. Adding to the problem was the feature of Wordpress 1.5 that stores all spam comments. The comment fulltext index had grown to over 50 megs in size (with over 25000 spam comments plus the few thousand legit ones). All of this resulted in every mysql query taking more than one second to execute.

I removed the fulltext index, cleaned out all the spam comments and optimized all the tables and the speed seems to have returned. This post is not meant to defame Spam Karma since I believe that it is a VERY good plugin but it is meant to educate other users that might be having the same problem. If you want to continue using SK with Wordpress 1.5 and want to recover some of the performance loss, I suggest you use some kind of a plugin that deletes spam comments instead of storing them in the database.

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After a very good run of CSPAM, I have decided to end the project and make it “Riskware”. In other words, CSPAM will no longer be actively monitored or supported. It will remain in its place but the script will run its own course. I will continue to use it for my own purposes and siphon off spam from my various blogs. Lack of interest from users and lack of resources to run such a large repository are some of the primary causes for shutting it down.

I say that it was a good run because I have caught close to 783,000 spam comments with CSPAM, have amassed over 4500 spam phrases and over 7000 spammer IPs since I put it in place back in November, 2004. Unless there is a huge outcry over its demise, or someone is willing to take over the code and the database, it will remain as it is, siphoning off spam from the blogosphere. I have learnt a quite a bit about spam, spammers, spamming, blog trends and such from this project and I wish more people could have benefitted from it. Although only a handful of users actually used CSPAM, I can proudly say that Three Strikes and CSPAM gave rise to a bunch of new Spam prevention plugins for blogs and motivated people to use fuzzy principles in blog spam prevention.

Dangers of running CSPAM without a maintainer (namely, myself) include random and adhoc addition of IPs and words to the database and killing of legit comments. I will keep monitoring it for a couple more weeks to give people the opportunity to switch to other spam killing methods.

Sorry if this causes you any trouble.