Discourse AI spam detection replaces Akismet plugin

Starting today, we will be removing the Discourse Akismet plugin and will instead enable Discourse AI - Spam detection by default for hosted customers on Starter and Standard plans.

Why are we making this change?

Over the past few weeks, we’ve found our AI spam detector to deliver a superior performance over Akismet.

We’ve had over 126 sites extensively using it and within Meta, we’ve personally seen over 96% success rate in detecting spam.

On top of the performance, the setup would now be a default experience with customization and flexible options, should you need it.

What do I need to do?

If you are on our Starter or Standard hosting, nothing at all!

The change would happen automatically in the background. You will no longer see Akismet within the plugins. You will now see the AI spam detector turned on in the AI plugin setting using a Discourse-hosted open-weights LLM

If you have the AI plugin disabled, then you would manually need to turn on AI spam detector and select an LLM

I already have AI spam detection enabled!

If you already have AI spam detector enabled via What's New experiments, then you can safely ignore this announcement since you already have it!

Why is this change only for Starter and Standard?

As usual, the rollout of changes in our hosting begin with the starting tiers and are gradually expanded to cover all tiers.

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Rebranding the ai spam detection account

Does this mean you’re discontinuing the plugin at all, or just that you’re no longer offering it on your hosted platform? I’m self-hosted and I’m not using any ‘AI’. Will I be forced to start using the AI Spam detection?

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This change only affects hosted customers on Starter and Standard plan tiers. The Akismet plugin is removed and no longer available for those plan tiers

Self hosters can make their own choices here

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Will AI spam detection work properly for languages with lesser people who speak the language in the world base? Like e.g. Ukrainian.

Also, will it handle bilingual posts, which is natural for some countries, like e.g. in Ukraine people speak both Ukrainian and Russian interchangeably, and they can sometimes use both in a single post.

I guess another example could be Naple/Italian? Or Spanish/Catalan? But not very sure about these pairs – I only know about Ukrainian/Russian.

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Absolutely, it simply depends on the LLM you use to power it.

Google models tend to be extremely multilingual, Gemini Flash is 120 languages so it is a good candidate.

Try it out with the test button on some real posts, some spam posts etc… you can provide custom instructions like:

Posting in Russian / Ukrainian interchangeably is fine.

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Via OpenAI works for Finnish. Well, it gives every now and then false positives if there is one liner, but I don’t think that is language issue, but weak prompting.

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