Rewriting a 20-year-old Python library

Summary

Rewriting a 20-year-old Python library Published on: March 23, 2026 Categories: Meta, Programming, Python Way back in 2005, lots of people (ordinary people, not just people who work in tech) used to have personal blogs where they wrote about things, rather than using third-party short-form social media sites. I was one of those people (though I wasn’t yet blogging on this specific site, which launched the following year). And back in 2005, and even earlier, people liked to have comment sections on their blogs where readers could leave their thoughts on posts. And that was an absolute magnet for spam. There were a few attempts to do something about this. One of them was Akismet, which launched that year and provided a web service you could send a comment (or other user-generated-content) submission to, and get back a classification of spam or not-spam. It turned out to be moderately popular, and is still around today. The folks behind Akismet also documented their API and set up an API key system so people could write their own clients/plugins for various programming languages and blog engines and content-management systems. And so pretty quickly after the debut of the Akismet service, Michael Foord, who the Python community, and the world, tragically lost at the beginning of 2025, wrote and published a Python library, which he appropriately called akismet, that acted as an API client for it. He published a total of five releases of his Python Akismet library over the next few years, and people started using it. Including me, because I had several use cases for spam filtering as a service. And for a while, things were good. But then Python 3 was released, and people started getting serious about migrating to it, and Michael, who had been promoted into the Python core team, didn’t have a ton of time to work on it. So I met up with him at a conference in 2015, and offered to maintain the Akismet library, and he graciously accepted the offer, imported a copy of his work...