Tag: spam

Update on the Spam Front

So, a few weeks ago, I was getting fed up with the comment spam onslaught, and tried using captcha technology to shut it down. And it worked, which was great, but it also caused some problems for some readers, which was not so great. Pissing off readers is not something I want to do, so I dropped the captcha and am trying some new back-end spam filters instead.

Although the new spam filters seem to be working well so far, I’m a bit bummed about the outcome, because the captcha plug-in I was using — reCaptcha — is a bit more than your average spam deflector:

ReCaptcha is a rather clever service using them to help digitize books scanned into the Internet Archive as well. It’s a project from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.

The Internet Archive is home to over 200,000 scanned copies of classic books. Some of them are gorgeously crafted, like this children’s book, but fancy styling can make it difficult for computers to translate the books into an indexable digital text. Much like a Mechanical Turk application, ReCaptcha uses humans to translate images of scanned words that a computer couldn’t understand.

I’d like to implement ReCaptcha at work instead of the captcha currently in place on the blog there, but it’s busy as hell right now; I probably won’t be able to get to it for a few more weeks.

Against The Grain

I’m of the camp that feels a blog is not a blog without comments. I also feel that there should be as few barriers to entry as possible when it comes to allowing comments. Easy interaction is a huge part of what has made the Internet great, and I’m a huge fan of it.

However, the damned comment spammers have made it impossible for me to run my blog the way I’d prefer. The vast majority of my older blog entries have had their comments closed to keep the spammers at bay, I’ve added all sorts of anti-spam plug-ins, and I’ve turned trackbacks off entirely.

And despite it all, especially in the last 48 hours, the comment spam has been overwhelming.

So today, and unwillingly, Captcha verification has been added to the blog comment form (Thanks Scott!). I really wish I didn’t have to, but it’s either that or go to some form of user registration / comment moderation, and on balance, I think Captcha is a little less of a burden all around.

To all you comment spammers out there who’ve forced me into this: You suck.

To the rest of you: I’m sorry. I hope it’s not too much of a hassle.

False Positives

A month or so ago, I posted a blog entry noting that I was having a problem with comments vanishing when I posted to WordPress blogs. Thanks to the kind operator the Burbed blog, who listened to my complaints and took the time to do some testing, I finally have an answer to why my comments were vanishing into the aethir.

Apparently, my ‘handle’ of Fiat Lux is classed as ‘definitely spam’ by one of the common WordPress spam filters (presumably Akismet).

That’s moderately annoying, since I’m rather fond of that phrase.

Is It Me, or Is It WordPress?

Lately, I’ve been having a real problem with some WordPress blogs. For reasons that I do not understand, comments I leave seem to vanish into the bit bucket as soon as I press the Submit button. This is getting very frustrating and makes me feel like not reading those blogs anymore, because I don’t want to waste my time writing up comments that just go ‘poof’. I suppose it just goes to show how much the ability to comment has — at least for me — become an embedded part of the blog experience.

The blogs in question are all run by different people on different servers, and possibly even with different versions of WordPress, although I haven’t checked to verify that last point.

I know about comment moderation, but I’ve been assured by some of the site owners in question that my comments were not moderated out. Apparently they’re not even making it into the moderation queue.So the question is, why? What else could be wrong?

It’s occurred to me that the problem could be on my end. I use Firefox almost exclusively, and it could be that this is some subtle browser glitch. Scott has told me to try using Internet Explorer instead of Firefox to see if that’s the problem, but frankly, if it is, that’s not going to be a helpful solution; I don’t want to go back to IE just so I can leave comments on some blogs.

A quick search of the WordPress FAQ and Forums doesn’t provide any easy answers, and I haven’t done an in-depth dig into other possible sources of answers yet. I’ll be looking at this question a bit more over the weekend. If I come up with a good answer, I’ll update this post.

Reason #243,945 Why I Hate Spam

Lately it feels like I’ve been inundated by spam. Every single e-mail account I have has seen an increase in spam, the blog’s been getting an upswing in trackback and comment spam … I can’t seem to get away from it. I don’t know it it’s just a seasonal thing or if the change is permanent. I’m hoping for the former, because if not then I’m going to have to take some steps to get things back to a manageable level again.

One particularly annoying event that happened in the last 48 hours is that some jerk sent me a virus. Although between Thunderbird and Norton, the virus didn’t infect my computer, the act of cleaning the virus out of my in-box blew away all the rest of the e-mail in my in-box, including a number of communications from friends that I needed to reply to.

In short, spammers suck.

Comment Spam Woes

Even with MT-Blacklist, the amount of time I have had to spend dealing with comment spam has been annoying lately, and apparently I am not the only one who’s having issues.

I am trying to decide how to manage the problem. SixApart says they are working on a solution but apparently it will involve upgrading my installation of MT and of MT-Blacklist. That’s a fair chunk of work on my part because moving off 2.x will entail not only the upgrade but a bunch of hours tweaking templates to put my customizations back in, and I am a little pressed for time these days.

I may try to implement the system Pandagon uses for its comments section, which is a patch that generates a random 6 digit number and requires users to type it in before a comment will be posted.

I can, of course, just turn off commenting entirely, but I really don’t want to do that.