What is Waegis?
Waegis is a professional online spam filter that targets various spam types for site, blog, forum, wiki and email. Waegis is able to help you in order to auto-block spams and stay away from them!
How does it work?
Waegis is an online web service that exposes an open API (Application Programming Interface). It gets incoming data through its API methods and applies a quick check and identifies spam and legitimate content on time. It then returns a result to client to specify if the content is spam or not.
How to use the service?
First register on the site and activate your account. Then log into site and navigate to dashboard. After that, enter your site’s URL in textbox and proceed in order to grab an API key.
After retrieving your API key, install a plug-in for your client application. You then need to configure this plug-in with your API key. At this point, you can start using our services!
What are the benefits of Waegis?
This is a good question! We should have some benefits that attract users to use our service and prefer it to similar services available out there.
- Reliability: This is a very important concern for users. We try to be more reliable than all the similar services. In our mind a few seconds of downtime is not acceptable because it can let many spams to get through! We need to always keep everything with the best quality up.
- Quality: Here we can define the quality as the less number of fault ratios (false-positives and false-negatives) as well as faster services. We always try to achieve both and hopefully have been able to do this to now!
- Accounting and pricing: We also try to offer free services with less limitations to our smaller clients beside commercial services with cheaper prices to bigger clients. Our accounting and pricing system is unique among all the similar services and we think that this is a very flexible accounting system. We always try to offer the most appropriate accounting and pricing for all of our clients.
- Better features: We also try to offer new and special features to our clients like the statistical reports and per-site management that lets every user define multiple sites and multiple API keys for different sites in his or her account.
We’ll be more than happy to hear about your suggestions and feedback to improve Waegis and make it better than this.
What is an API key?
An API key is a unique string value that we assign to individual sites and you can grab your own key via dashboard (after signing into the site). This API key is an identifier for your site and as a main part of our service, it is used frequently in our API. You need to use this API key in order to configure your client application. For future needs, try to store and keep your API key securely!
The important point is to not share this API key with others because it is a private value!
What is a site instance?
Site instance is another important concept in our service. A site instance is actually a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and is used to distinguish different parts of a single site.
The best way to describe a site instance is giving some common examples. On a multi-blog site each blog has its own site instance that is the homepage URL of that blog. On a forum, different sub-forums have their own site instances that are the homepage URLs of each forum or sub-forum.
You need to initialize your site instance before calling our API methods to check your content. There are some limitations for the number of site instances associated with each API key and account type! So we monitor your usage based on site instances and may block your account if you try to use a single site instance instead of multiple site instances!
Which content providers do you support?
Technically we’re able to support any content provider system (i.e. blog engine, forum, wiki or CMS) because we expose an open web-based API. But there is only a requirement and that is a client-side implementation of a plug-in for these content providers.
However, at the moment we support all the common .NET content providers including Telligent Community Server (2008, 2007.1 and 2.1), Telligent Graffiti CMS 1.1, BlogEngine.NET 1.3 & 1.4. We also have provided a .NET library that can be applied to integrate Waegis with any .NET application.
I couldn't find a plug-in for my application!
Having a client-side implementation for Waegis API is a basic requirement for using our service. We have started our work with targeting the .NET community and have provided default client-side implementations for famous .NET engines. We’re also trying to extend our service and provide plug-ins for other engines as well.
If there isn’t an existing plug-in for your application then you have two options. If you have enough technical skills to develop such an implementation then please do this favor and help us. We really appreciate any help to let us extend our service. If you can’t develop such an implementation then please let us know about your application and its version and we will add it to our list. We have an internal list of applications to implement our plug-ins for and give them more priority per user requests.
What is spam and what is ham?
In spam filtering terminology spam refers to the bad content that we want to block because it usually contains unrelated offensive material or advertisement. Ham is the name for legitimate content and has the opposite meaning to spam!
What are false-positive and false-negative?
These are common terms in the spam filtering terminology. Spam filtering methods don’t have a %100 accuracy and at a large scale they don’t seem to be able to achieve %100 forever! But the quality of a spam filtering service can be determined by its fault ratios. Fault ratios are defined as false-positive and false-negative. These are of course general terms in the statistics but we give a definition for spam filtering systems.
False-positive is a legitimate content that is marked as spam and false-negative is a spam content that is marked as legitimate content. We’re always trying to reduce both ratios and you can help us in this way. Waegis is written on top of some self-learning algorithms so you can teach it about its faults by reporting false-positives and false-negatives via our API methods.
Can I use it for non-English sites?
Yes, sure! We have fed the system with many of the spoken languages and have users from different countries around the globe!
Can I use it for a blog?
Yes, one of the main and common applications of the Waegis is for filtering blog comment and trackback spams.
Can I use it for a forum?
Yes, this is one of the main applications of the Waegis so you can use our service to block your forum spams.
Can I use it for a wiki?
Yes, this is also possible and is beside the main applications of the Waegis so you can use our service to block your wiki spams. Wiki spams are one of the newest kinds of spams and are growing fast!
Can I use it for email?
Simply yes! Email spam is the oldest kind of spam and we’re able to catch email spams as well as other modern web spam types. The good news is the cheaper prices of Waegis services in comparison with many of the common email spam filters. So you can pay less to stay away from email spams easily! We have good offers for hosting providers!
Can I use other spam filter tools?
Yes, you can! You can feel free to use any other spam filter mechanism or even drop Waegis and make yourself free! But the point is that Waegis works as an independent and standalone spam filtering service so it is able to block spams whether you use any other client-side mechanism or not.
What's the most appropriate account type for me?
The answer is not easy to answer here. First we refer you to our Commercial Use page that contains a good description of our commercial services and account types.
We’re always open to receive your questions about this and answer them quickly so just drop us a line and we will guide you with the best and cheapest account type that is most appropriate for your needs.
What are the benefits of the commercial accounts?
There are some benefits for using commercial accounts. First of all, you help us to provide a better service for yourself and others. After that, larger number of allowed API calls per month, larger number of the site instances to use, faster and more reliable services and better quality as well as email support and being aware of upcoming changes and downtimes are technical benefits of the commercial accounts.
My API key doesn’t work!
Don’t worry! This is a common issue and has some common reasons as well. Here are some possibilities that require you to check them:
- You have exceeded your account limits (maximum number of monthly API calls or site instances).
- You have had frequent invalid initialization method calls with your API key so it is temporary blocked by our security system automatically. This takes a while to get back to normal state and may vary from a few minutes to a few days. This period is calculated by our system automatically and is not modifiable unless you can prove a mistake by us!
- You have used your API key in a way that is not agreed upon our privacy policy and terms of service. For example, you might have used your API key for a single site instance that had to be used for multiple site instances or you might have used your API key for a different site/domain name than your registered site/domain.
- You have used your API key in an unusual way that might be suspicious for our automatic security guard or our administrators so they have blocked your account. You need to prove your right usage of our service in order to be able to re-enable your account.
If you checked these and still couldn’t address the reason, feel free to contact us with details of your account and we’ll start examining it.
My request is blocked!
Too bad! If you’re looking for a reason then we should say that there are some common scenarios:
- If you use any invalid API key then our system will block your request immediately.
- If you initialize a site instance with your API key and it fails for some special reasons then we will block your API key temporary.
- If you do anything against our privacy policy and terms of service then your user account and/or API keys will be blocked.
You can always feel free to contact us and ask about this issue.
I am blocked!
And are you sure you are not a spammer?!!
If you think that you are blocked by our service then feel free to drop us a line with some requested information and we will try to solve this issue as soon as possible.
How do you count my API calls?
This is a common question and one of the main concerns for our users because there are some limitations for the maximum number of monthly API calls per API key.
We have provided four methods on our API: initialize, check, report-ham and report-spam. We count your calls for each of these methods but in two groups. Your calls to initialize method are counted separately and are not considered as a part of your monthly API calls and your calls to check, report-ham and report-spam are calculated as your monthly API calls.
Of course, there are some limitations for the maximum number of calls to initialize method but this method is isolated from others.
How many sites can I add to my account?
When you create an account on Waegis you’re allowed to add multiple sites to your account and retrieve separate API keys for each site. The number of allowed sites may change in the future but at the moment we allow you to add up to 5 sites to your account but this is limited to maximum of 3 free API keys only.
What does Waegis mean?
Waegis name stands for Web + Aegis and it means that we want to act like an aegis for the web! You can see the meaning of the aegis word in a dictionary if you don’t know about its meaning.
Waegis is hard to pronounce!
Yes, it may be, of course for non-English speakers! You can pronounce it “vee-jis”!
How can I help?
We appreciate any help from you. We want to help everyone enjoy a better web when web 3.0 is coming and is known as semantic web! So you can help us to help the rest of the web have a clearer content!
There are many ways that you can help us but here are some common ways that we can suggest:
- Simply use our service: This helps us get more data and accuracy based on your reports.
- Apply for a commercial key: When you apply for a commercial key, you’re actually supporting us with money to keep our services up!
- Write about the Waegis: You can write blog posts, tech-reviews and similar writings about Waegis to help promoting it!
- Recommend us to your friends: This way you can bring more users to our site and help us grow faster.
- Bookmark us on social bookmarking sites: Social bookmarking sites can bring a huge number of users and promote us significantly.
- Use our badges: This is another way to promote us and bring new users to our site. There are some badges that you can use and there are also some statistical badges available for your sites.
Who’s behind Waegis?
The main guy behind this service is Keyvan Nayyeri, a young software architect and developer with a serious passion in solving uncommon problems. There are also two other guys beside Keyvan that help him to provide the best possible service: Mehrdad Ebrahimi and Shaho Toofani. You can read more about the team in about page.