Keyvan Nayyeri

Phil is busy with moving from LA to Seattle so has ordered me to do the job of releasing the first final version of Subkismet. Here I hope that he can relocate easily and get success in Seattle as he was in LA. I would also give credit back to him before talking about the new release of Subkismet because he was the main guy behind this project not me.

I have to call Friday "the day of Subkismet" because it's now three weeks that I spend my Fridays on this project.

I would also be happy to announce the availability of Subkismet 1.0 because most likely this is the first major release of a .NET open source project in new year (2008) so here I start the .NET open source wave in 2008 as well. I hope we can have a good and active year for the .NET open source community in 2008.

What is Subkismet?

I don't think my regular visitors and active community members don't know about Subkismet but for those who may need some information, first I have to refer to this introduction post by Phil Haack (the founder of Subkismet) and then say that Subkismet is a framework to fight against spam in .NET web applications which assists .NET developers to stop spammers and defeat them. Subkismet is actually a set of controls, service clients and other tools to accomplish this goal but we're making it a framework smoothly.

Subkismet was originally a set of a few tools that were used in Subtext and DasBlog blogging engines but now we've extended it to something more than it.

There have been only one public release available for Subkismet before this and that was version 0.2.2 Beta that was released right after introducing the project.

What is Included?

For the current version (1.0) we've included following tools in Subkismet core library:

• Akismet service client: Akismet is an online web service that helps to block spam. This service client implementation for .NET is done by Phil and lets you send your comments to the service to check them against a huge database of spammers.
• Invisible CAPTCHA control: A clever CAPTHCA control that hides from real human but appears to spammers. This control is done by Phil and you can read more about it here.
• CAPTCHA control: An excellent implementation of traditional image CAPTCHA control for ASP.NET applications.
• Honeypot CAPTCHA: Another clever CAPTCHA control that hides form fields from spam bots to stop them. This control is done by Phil and you can read more about it here.
• Trackback HTTP Module: An ASP.NET Http Module that blocks trackback spam. This module is done by Mads Kristensen and he has explained his method in a blog post and this Word document.
• Google Safe Browsing API service client: This is done by me and you saw its Beta 2 version last week. Google Safe Browsing helps you check URLs to see if they're phishing or malware links.

Akismet service client, Invisible CAPTCHA and normal CAPTCHA were a part of 0.2.2 Beta release but other parts are new in Subkismet 1.0.

The Future

Of course, there is an inconsistency in the classes included in Subkismet 1.0 library and this is because of the fact that initially we didn't have any consideration for the project to reach to this point so haven't chosen the appropriate structure for namespaces in the library. We've been moving from a few core tools to a general framework and this forced us rethink about the structure of the project. I've had some offline conversations with Phil about the future of the project in the past week and we'll announce about it very soon.

However, Subkismet 1.0 is our release for all developers who want to use it for .NET Framework 2.0 and we're at the middle of the process to apply major changes to the project structure and namespaces.

We're going to make these changes and release another version in near future (maybe next Friday!). This new version should target .NET Framework 3.5 and should have a completely different structure. We're also working on other human interactive proofs and spam busting techniques to help you more than this.

Download

So what's remained? Yes, download link! You can download binary and source code in separate packages from this page.

Due to a few problems I couldn't generate the CHM documentation file for our class libraries but I think they're easy to use as are. Moreover you can follow abovementioned links for samples to work with different parts of Subkismet which would be much better than a pure generated documentation! On the other hand, Subkismet demo site has some good sample codes for those who want to get started with the API.

We're looking for your feedbacks and comments to regard them in the next coming-soon release of Subkismet.