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.
I always meant to get in touch with you again about CSPAM, but I just haven’t had the time. New job, new baby on the way, and a new house — that’s a lot of time-suckers! 🙂