How to Make Yourself Look Like a Moron
Apr 6th, 2008 at 3:04 am by Chris
Four easy steps:
- Try to leave a comment on a blog post
- Become indignant when that comment doesn’t immediately make it’s way past the comment spam filter
- Fail to make use of the easy to use contact form linked at the very top of the blog in question in order to inform the blog administrators that your comment has been mistakenly identified as spam and ask them, politely, to approve your comment
- Write a long, whiney ass titty baby post on your own blog decrying the hypocrisy of the owner of the blog you tried to leave your comment on for denying the world a chance to read your unique and pristine wisdom
Not to put too fine a point on it, but seriously, it’s 2008 and this whole spam filter thing should be pretty basic to anybody who’s ever used email. To the best of my knowledge, there isn’t an alternate universe where nothing legitimate ever gets caught in spam filters. The stupid, it really is starting to burn.
Update: Aforementioned whiny ass titty baby responds:
Chris, over at Suburban Guerrilla, has written a post claiming it was all the spam filters fault. I notice that he does not mention that it was my second comment that was censored. Evidently I was supposed to beg to have my 2nd comment posted.
Interesting thing for him/her to notice. Well, if it makes everybody feel better, this was that person’s 2nd comment. I’m not sure if he/she wants a prize for making two comments, but I did want to make sure that I didn’t leave out this totally irrelevant fact. Really, the only slightly remarkable thing about this whole chain of events is that having flagged the commenter’s second comment as spam, that the spam software didn’t also delete the commenter’s first comment. I guess I need to work on that once I finish up with the 72 or so other things I’ve been disparately meaning to get around to one day.
Update: So I got to wondering why a person’s second comment, rather than their first, might get flagged. Here it is:
Have a look at the Snowball Effect portion. Basically what that means is that if a new commenter leaves two comments in under three days the second will be penalized. Not a very interesting mystery, but it’s been solved. Anyway, I’ve changed that setting to help prevent repeats of this fun little episode.
as someone who suffered similar issues with the spam blocking on this site, I agree that it can be frustrating but as Susie will confirm, I showed patience. I surely recognize the problems with allowing anonymous people to post comments on this blog.
Spam filtering in e-mail and spam filtering on a blog are entirely separate issues and as a system administrator, I find a single false positive identification of legitimate e-mail a cause for concern. I spent a lot of time and energy integrating technology to prevent that from occurring. False positives are not a problem for me on any system that I administrate for clients and I would pose that my methodology of filtering e-mail is extremely effective.
Spam filtering on a blog is something that I haven’t spent too much time doing and of course, the methodologies are completely dictated by the blog software and host system that you use. Having spent a few hours cleaning spam junk off my company’s CMS system, I promptly stopped allowing anonymous comments and required verifiable mail addresses and the problem went away.
I am not going to comment on your assessment about ‘whiney ass titty baby poster’ except to say that you should anticipate that given the relative higher difficulty it is to post anonymous here than other blogs, it’s probably not an unexpected outcome. It is your system to administrate and I don’t fault your desires but think that you have to keep perspective of the fact that this blog is not very friendly to anonymous commenters.
There’s anonymous, and then there’s pseudonymous. It’s not like everyone’s using their real names here.
At Feministe, we upgraded to Akismet, which is a pretty good filter. But we still have a long, long list of rather prosaic words that will trip the spam filter anyhow, just because spammers use prosaic words to get through filters.
Back before we upgraded and we had to keep fishing legitimate comments out of spam, I did threaten to boil in oil anyone who whined about not getting their comments approved instantly.
Just on a technical note, for the past few days, I’ve been getting an error message after I post, and the comment doesn’t always seem to make it through.
Given the aggravation I go through at my own low traffic blog that requires four different plug-ins to make spam filtering manageable while allowing people to comment freely, I expect to get swept up on occasion, especially since I use a very large ISP which makes me collateral damage in many cases of IP banning.
Getting a valid e-mail account for commenting on blogs is not onerous, and there are good and valid ways of really being anonymous on the ‘Net that can still normally go through the spam filters.
If you are posting anonymously, you are really blowing your “cover” when you can’t get through and then blog about it - bad technique that.
I don’t expect people to complain vociferously if they get caught by a spam filter, I expect them to let me know so I can determine why and correct it. At least on WordPress you can normally retrieve the comment, which is better than having it dumped to /dev/null by Haloscan or Blogger.
white_n_az, I’m the first to admit that it is harder here then on some other sites and I really wish that didn’t need to be the case. As I’ve mentioned before, the number of attempts to leave spam comments on this site is astronomical and it causes huge problems, not just in terms of commenting, but also in terms of server load and site crashes. On a number occasions we’ve had to switch to a registration only system just to keep the site up and running.
As you can probably confirm, Susie goes to a lot of trouble to make sure that people’s comments get posted when they’re having trouble. When it’s a persistent problem she gets me involved and then I do whatever I can to make sure people having trouble are able to comment, as you can probably also confirm.
I’m the first to admit that it’s far from ideal. It just bugs the shit out of me when I see people attack Susie over technical glitches, immediately assuming that it’s some sort of an attempt to keep them down.
Man, I’m away from the computer a few days and one of my favorite blogs is suddenly under attack from all directions. Look, I had the same thing happen - wrote a few comments which were posted, then sent a negative one which didn’t appear and, at the same time, some of my earlier comments dissappeared as well. So I did what any decent person would do. I wrote a flaming comment accusing the site administraters of being vile censors. Ok, I was an a**hole.
But, I also used the comment form to write for an explaination - which I promptly received. Spam filter - oh yeah, I’ve heard of those. So then I wrote another comment apologizing for my flame comment.
Look, we are all human and all occassionally screw up. No big deal - be an adult and apologize. For the love of God please don’t keep complaining. Go through posts here and you’ll see I routinely disagree with Susie - and????? And nothing. My comments are posted.
No paranoia needed.
Peace
Bob
sheesh i’ve actually eve had spam filters catch me at my own blog once.
nice work at “peace promotion” too.
wow i really should use that preview button so i don’t sound like such a moron. above should read “i actually even had the spam filter catch me at my own blog once.”
Chris - please don’t misunderstand my posting - I wasn’t trying to be overly critical because it’s not my blog and it’s not my time/energy maintaining it.
Also, I tried to point out that I was very patient, kept explaining my issues to Susie who retrieved my comments from moderator queue. I don’t think any of my comments that were flagged as ’spam’ ever made it online.
Also note that I am a system administrator myself and I appreciate that there are some software packages and systems that I don’t want to become intimate with every gritty detail in order to make it work properly and thus settle for less than optimal configurations on some things.
I think that my issue cleared up when my home ‘router’ went flaky and Cox Communications ended up giving me a new IP address by the time I got back online and many of my issues went away…so it became obvious to me that a large part of your spam detection revolves around flagging an IP address as abusive at which point everything coming from that IP address is suspect (which I presume is why I was finally able to post hyperlinks in comments which I wasn’t able to do with my old IP address).
Anyway…I didn’t gripe or vent with all my initial problems.
As for WATB…it’s nice of him to drive traffic from his blog to yours. Our culture evidently requires immediate gratification and I can tell you are very sad to have disappointed.
By the way, I have traditionally been a huge fan of ‘captcha’ type of turing tests to eliminate spam. I don’t know if you have all of the necessary dependent software on your server (typically it’s ImageMagick) but it really separates the humans from the bots, or at least it has done a yeoman’s job over the years but I have heard that Google/Gmail has found that some bots have gotten past their implementation.
Yeah, we actually do have captcha as part of the filter. It only comes up if you’re comment has just barely been flagged as spam. When an IP address gets flagged from one of the blacklists (internal and external), as was the case with WATB, the score is so low that a captcha isn’t offered.
Chris - the plight that WATB experienced was the same as I experienced. I was never offered captcha type options and I’m quite certain that my IP address was flagged on your internal blacklist and it made my posting comments limited to one per day - as far as I could tell.
Of course WATB and I responded to the challenge entirely differently. I actually wanted to participate here so I kept contacting Susie.
I just want you to consider that people who actually want to participate in the comments here will likely be blocked along with spam purveyors. I’m not trying to be critical of your philosophy of setup but rather trying to be instructive that you probably have a much higher incidence of false positives than is optimal if it is the yours/Susie’s intent to encourage participation by others.
For the record, I NEVER bother with haloscan comments on say Eschaton or Shakesville which are sites that drive a lot of commenting.
Actually, the false positives have been pretty low up until the last month or so. I think adjusting the snowball timings should really help things considerably, but that could just be wishful thinking. It could just be that the IP blacklists have hit a critical mass. Probably just the effing primary though. I blame it for everything else. The silliest part about all of this is that I’d already pulled WATB’s comment out of the spam filter before I even read his/her WATB post. You can read it in its full glory here. Oh, well. Nothing like a pointless blog fight.