Less than a week ago, we were launching our major campaign: “A bullet for every Spammer, a lifetime supply of quality gin for dr Dave“.

We called for your generosity in helping make this dream come true (especially the drinkable part).

The results are in.

You, people… how shall I put it… You people… well… you truly and utterly rock. All of you. You are the best users a comment-spam plugin developer could ever want. And I’m not saying that because I am currently typing this atop an air mattress floating on an olympic-sized pool of gin, a feeding tube taped to the corner of my mouth. Although it might be helping.

I know I said there were no hard milestones in funding and I am usually loathe to boast of donation figures, but I feel I must make an exception and mention here that, for the past week alone, your donations have totalled a little over 800 US dollars, shared between dozens of people, spanning from $2 to $50, all equally humbling as a developer.

Do you realize how many days of uninterrupted drug binge this money represents? In fact, you may never hear from me again.

I have compiled a list of all donators (past, present and hopefully future): if you have donated at any point, please go look for your name and ensure it’s there, the way you want it (I wasn’t able to dig URLs for some people despite my best detective work). For those interested in paying for additional exposure, a small extra fee will get you a laser-engraving of your name and website on a prominent part of my liver.

Also: I will be contacting shortly all those who offered their time to help with SK2 documentation and support.

As for Spam Karma’s release schedule, here is a tentative roadmap:

1. SK2.2 Beta is now available for download. Among other things, it fixes tons of miscellaneous compatibility issues with exotic server installs, WP versions and browsers. It also incorporates some small tune-ups and improvements that should help deal with recent spambot advances (although nothing radical yet). Note that it is still a beta: only install if you are comfortable with a certain risk factor and make sure you religiously upgrade to final as soon as it’s out.
2. If testing of the current beta doesn’t reveal flesh-eating tendencies, a Spam Karma 2.2 Final should be out by next week-end.
3. By then, I will be running a second donation drive in order to fund my trip to Borneo, where I shall be attempting to capture enough monkeys to ship along with every future version of SK3 (all part of the plan to use P2P blacklisting).
4. Failing that, a 2.3 version of SK2 should happen sometime in March that brings some amount of Naive Bayes filtering to the mix.
5. And then there is this large iron padded door over there, behind which our research staff is hard at work on classified anti-spam weaponry. Unfortunately I cannot let you in at the moment.

In the meantime, keep the suggestions coming and let me know of any bug you spot in either betas or final versions of Spam Karma.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to collect my check and go snort a pound of cocaine off a hooker’s cleavage.