Marc-André Cournoyer’s blog

I know what you’re thinking: what kind of lazy ass are your Marc ? Did you get a life, lost your computer, your girlfriend went into labour ? More then a month since I released a project! Wow, I must have been pretty busy…

While talking with Carl at the last Montreal on Rails meeting, it occurred to me that it would be cool to integrate spam filtering with Defensio in my next project (more details on this eventually).

Defensio has received good and bad reviews, but from what I understand, it really gets better with time as opposite to Akismet who plateau pretty soon. I think one of the reason why Defensio might be better is that it uses much more data to classify your comments. Not just the content and user IP but the author email, the date of the article and the color of the sox the author’s sister’s father in law wore last weekend. That might be hard and tortuous to supply, especially when he’s on vacation. So that’s why I though I could make a Rails plugin that make it easy to supply all this info without hunting into your sister’s father in law wardrobe.

Get to the point already

1) The first thing your need to do to use the defensio Rails plugin is to install it:

script/plugin install http://code.macournoyer.com/svn/plugins/defensio/

2) Then you might want to create a config file in /yourapp/config/defensio.yml

development:
  api_key: 1234abc
  owner_url: http://code.macournoyer.com/svn/plugins/defensio

test:
  api_key: 1234abc
  owner_url: http://code.macournoyer.com/svn/plugins/defensio

production:
  api_key: 6789xyz
  owner_url: http://code.macournoyer.com/svn/plugins/defensio

You’ll need to get an API key at this point. Ask the guys at Defensio, or spam Carl until he gives you one.

3) Next step is to add the columns used to store the comment spaminess level

script/generate defensio_migration comment

(Replace comment with the name of your model that you want to be marked as spam/ham)

Run it like there’s no tomorrow !

rake db:migrate

4) In your article class (the one that holds the comments), add:

acts_as_defensio_article

By default the following fields will be looked up for values: author, author_email, title, content, permalink.
You can change those fields with the :fields options, like this:

acts_as_defensio_article :fields => { :content => :body }

The content value will be fetched from the body method.

5) In your comment class (the one that can be spam or ham), add:

acts_as_defensio_comment

Same things apply with the :fields thinggy. Looking in the following fields by default: author, content, title, author_email, author_url, article.permalink, trusted_user and logged_in.

6) Add some magic in your controller:

class CommentsController < ApplicationController
  def index
    @ham  = @article.comments.find_all_by_spam(false)
    @spam = @article.comments.find_all_by_spam(true, :order => ‘spaminess desc‘)
  end

  def create
    @comment = @article.comments.build(params[:comment])
    @comment.env = request.env

    if @comment.save
      if @comment.spam
        flash[:notice] = ‘Your comment has been marked for review‘
      else
        flash[:notice] = ‘Comment created‘
      end
      redirect_to article_url(@article)
    else
      render :action => ‘new‘
    end
  end

  def report_as_spam
    @comment = @article.comments.find(params[:id])
    @comment.report_as_spam
  end

  def report_as_ham
    @comment = @article.comments.find(params[:id])
    @comment.report_as_ham
  end

  def stats
    @stats = Comment.defensio_stats
  end
end

You’re done! Now go find some spammers !

Beta aka buggy

I’ve started to use this plugin myself in one of my personal project but not for very long. It might contain some bugz. Although I doubt it… I never write bugs. If you encounter any unwanted features (aka bug) please let me know in the comments here.

Thanks to the guys at Karabunga for making Defensio, using the API was a real pleasure!

Update: There are more detailed code sample in the plugin svn: http://code.macournoyer.com/svn/plugins/defensio/example/

Update: Documentation is online.