On Fri, 24 May 2013 18:41:09 -0700, Al Johnson alj62888@yahoo.com wrote:
Although IP blocking isn't perfect, it's probably the most practical. How much worse would spam be without the current blacklists? Although machine learning is always an alluring route to take, it is very very very hard to get right and is still easily tricked. 99% of the mail in my Yahoo! spam folder is not spam. But, if you have a unique way to better detect spam using machine learning that doesn't require constant review, then I would gladly pay you for that service.
Yahoo is a pretty low bar to use. Plenty implementations get it better.
Email anti-spam has to deal with spam/not-spam from missions of untrusted users.
Wiki anti-spam can handle this a little easier. Spam/not-spam on wikis are only done by trusted users. So on the central system instead of having to vet every submission eventually you only need to vet wiki instead. Also since articles are public, not private like emails. So you can do proper vetting with a whole community.