[wp-hackers] Re: Spam Karma goes GPL

[Otto]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 11:01 AM, Xavier Borderie <xavier at borderie.net> wrote:
> Well, I don't know, there might some people out there who'd rather not
> have all their comments be handled by a third-party company through a
> closed-source service. Keeping one's comment on one's server.

See, I've heard this a lot, and I don't understand people's problem
with this whole concept. The idea of sending comments to a service to
have them scanned for spam makes far more sense to me, because that
centralized system can compare comments from all over the place, and
detect automated spammers much faster because of that.

Question: Are you against the whole concept of distributed computing
or webservices as well? For example, at my real-life job, we use a
third party service to get real-time sales tax rate information based
on addresses. We pay a small fee per lookup. This is better than
trying to do it all ourselves because there's 18000 tax jurisdictions
in this country and trying to keep up with changing rates and laws and
such is not worth our time. If we were huge and had lots of sales,
then maybe it would be worth the effort, but hey, maybe not.

The idea of contracting out a particular specific service to a
specialist makes sense to me. Why does it bother you to contract out
your comment spam-scanning to Akismet?

(This is not a question about the relative effectiveness of various
methods, mind you, just the specific idea of handling it with a third
party.)

-Otto