Akismet is a paid service and their apis are tailored for comments. An advantage with comments is that you can just mark as spam if some contents have dubious links or keywords.
An issue you have in many forms (e.g.: login form) is that there is limited data to decide if it's a real user or a bot.
Agreed on all points. That's why I said in my original comment: "I know these get used for more than [contact] form submissions, to stop bot sign ups etc…"
I picked up Akismet because it's been around forever, and while it is paid, it is very cheap for my use case.
This is a bit of an aside, but I feel like Automattic is sitting on several companies/products and not doing a whole lot with them.
Akismet could be expanded into a more fully featured server side spam detection SAAS with a flexible API etc...
Gravatar could be expanded into something like OpenID.
Its weird that no one has cracked: you bought a mattress recently, would you like to buy these bed sets or bed frames? Complementary goods are not exactly rocket science. If I go to a a dealer and buy a car they try and upsell me on features on the car, they don't try and sell me another car.
Depending on the app might not have better performance. The reason is that a host with more connections might not be using more resources than one with less connections. The busy connections might be waiting for a reply from an external service.
There a lot of ways to reduce, just some ideias: turn on 3dsecure authentication whenever available. Check user location vs card location. Validate cvc code and postal code. Check for user activity and user signals (user agent, screen size etc) on the website, and other methods.
Would be interesting to study if there is a correlation between layoffs and remote work and employee churn. It's easier to layoff people if you don't have a connection with them.
Or you get more rigorous about what is being accomplished and realize that you don't really need as many people. Or you decide that a remote worker can be anywhere, so why not use the global talent pool? These are the dark sides of WFH for employees.
