No, not movie spoilers, life spoilers. The f*ckers who mess things up on purpose, or by accident, or by just being stupid morons. The lowest common denominator. I’m kind of grouping two things together here but the group I’m pissed at is the one where people abuse the system, any (all?) system and make people take measures to protect themselves, thus making it less pleasant or useful for all others.
One of the places with free WiFi that I used to go to now charges by the half hour because people were abusing the system. Thanks morons. Chris goes in more detail on this issue as it relates to all forms of electronic communications; usegroups, email, discussion boards, messaging and now blog comments. If you have a blog you’ve almost certainly been under attack for the last few weeks or months, bastards posting fake comments containing loads of pr0n links, ads for Vi@gra, etc. I’ve been deleting comments every day for the last few weeks, not a huge deal in terms of time but huge in pissed off effect.
I’m writing this because I needed to bitch a bit but also to ask a question. I’m hesitating between two solutions, install Jay Allen’s MT Blacklist which filters out spam or to fight spam before if starts by disabling comments on entries older than a couple of weeks. The latter so far is my preferred choice since it doesn’t require installation—although disabling older entries is as much if not more work—and… I don’t know, it feels sufficient. If we start going with white lists doesn’t the whole thing escalate while just shutting off older comments just renders the comment spam thing moot?
So what do you think, anyone used to commenting on older entries or do you usually just comment on very recent entries? And if you have a blog, have you encountered the problem and how do you plan to take care of it?
3 Comments
Personally, I don’t think there’s much point in commenting on posts that are more than a week old.
I don’t have a comment-spam plan yet because so far it hasn’t been a problem. One thing I’m considering is winning the lottery so I can set up a clandestine organization that hunts down spammers, destroys their equipment, and bitch-slaps them until they can’t take it anymore. Such actions ought to be legal, BTW.
YES, the Great Blork Spammer Hunt. I like it!
James Seng has another mt plugin based on bayesian filter that you might want to check out. It should be a bit more flexible than blacklisting since it adapts to the content of comments over time. I haven’t tried it yet since spam is still manageable on my site but it works well apparently. In fact, you don’t even have to choose between mt-blacklist and mt-bayesian since they can be used together (Boris uses both I think).
As for closing comments on old posts, personally, I wouldn’t do it. It’s happened on a few occasion that people have found my site through google and left comments months after I had posted the entry. Plus, closing entries only means more work for you which seems backward.
blork, if you ever start that clandestine organization, let me know ’cause I also want to join the party.