I have been using Defensio.com on this blog for a few weeks now, and I am going to say that it is now better than Akismet was. Defensio takes a little bit of time to clue in to all spam, but it is a short process.
Now, go to any TypePad blog and leave a comment. You will get a nasty human-checker captcha like the one below. It is arcane and acts as a barrier to everyone, let alone anyone with a vision problems.
Now that Six Apart is getting back to things like blogging, as possibly evidenced by the recent selloff of Livejournal, they really should consider buying Defensio outright while the service is still young. The product is solid and tested, and transparent spam filtering is a requirement for Six Apart's products, not a nice to have.
Six Apart is widely considered to be the#2 blogging service behind Wordpress.com for serious bloggers. I do not have hard data to back that up, but I can say it is the perception. Very few new bloggers that I see are going to Typepad, but I am not convinced it has to be that way. Great, easy, set-it-and-forget-it spam filtering would be the most productive first step towards turning things around that Six Apart could take.
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