It’s always a shame when a great piece of software is discontinued, and this week whilst installation a new WordPress site I was shocked by a message on the Spam Karma screen – the “major announcement” was that development of the plug-in was being discontinued and the software would pass over to a GPL project.

I first discovered Spam Karma through a post on the Notes from Spain forum around the time I first started using WordPress. It’s a plug-in that really belongs in the software by default, as a popular blog gets spammed on a daily basis. Unfortunately, it’s not.

Spam Karma uses a clever set of rules to decide if a comment or trackback is spam, and I don’t think that any spam has ever got through on the installations that I support. There have have been some false positives – about 1 or 2 per year!

But I can understand the problem – the software is non-profit, so however passionately you develop it the time eventually comes where you decide to call time and move on to other projects.

The author’s blog gives one of the reasons as the current development of WordPress. I think WordPress is a great piece of software as well, but I do agree that the frequency at which the upgrades appear has recently become a little bit overwhelming. There have been times where I seem to be in a cycle of upgrading installations, and before I have finished the next version is released.

Let’s hope that this is not the end of the story for Spam Karma, and that some good programmers take over the project and keep the blogosphere free of spam.