Comments on: Taking on Comment Spam - Apologies for the Mess

By: Spice

Spice — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 21:49:06 +0000

Another recommendation for WordPress here. OpenSource always gets my vote. Plus there’s an initiative gaining steam out there called OpenID (http://www.openid.net/), which requires you to verify your identity once by proving affiliation with a URL, then being allowed to comment at participating sites simply by siting that URL. Something to keep an eye on (in a good way) as it developes.

Maybe then we could do away with the “nofollow” dealy. I like the trust factor afforded by legitimate blog comments.

Spice

By: mwarden

mwarden — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 03:14:11 +0000

Migrating from MT to WordPress is pretty easy. They made sure they made it easy after MT changed their license scheme and people started jumping ship. As for the nifty ajax commenting, obviously that would probably break for the most part. You could either fix it, or there are WordPress plugins available for ajax commenting (although they probably don’t work with WP 2.0 yet).

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 05:25:10 +0000

Wordpress looks nice, and I’d probably do it if it weren’t for the amount of work required migrating five years of weblog posts from one system to another. It was bad enough going from my old custom built weblog app to Movable Type a few years ago. Not to mention all the templating and nifty instant comment posting system that Bryan whipped up for MT.

We’ll see, thanks for all the suggestions though :)

By: mwarden

mwarden — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 11:27:01 +0000

Wordpress 2 final release actually has a plugin that uses a distributed spam comment system called Akismet. I just installed it and it looks decent. It’s like gmail, where all users identify a given comment as spam, and then any other comment on blogs on the network (those that use teh plugin) that looks like that comment will get flagged as spam. Might be something to look into.

By: Bruno Wolff

Bruno Wolff — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 19:43:33 +0000

Note that using referer (note that actual header name is not spelled the same as the English word) headers isn’t going to buy much in the long run. As soon as enough sites start using it to screen comments the bots will start supplying them.
Even things like captcha can be defeated, both by programs and by recruiting people to do it. (See http://www.boingboing.net/2004/01/27/solving_and_creating.html for one creative solution.)
A big step would be Microsoft redesigning their user interfaces so that they didn’t make it so easy for people to shoot themselves in the feet. That could make source based discrimination practical again.
In the medium term you could only let authenticated people post without moderation and use filtering to help with the moderation.

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 21:12:30 +0000

I’d recommend WordPress too. I started off with Movable Type, and had the same problems with spam. WP has mucn nicer filtering abilities, and has reduced spam to basically zero, without forcing commenters to beat a Turing test a la Blogger.

Plus, WordPress is released under the GPL, which kicks ass if, like me, you’re into that kind of thing.

By: Miriam

Miriam — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 17:42:35 +0000

I just switched up to the WordPress 2.0 release candidate, and it’s SpamKarma has worked like a charm. And it’s open source ;)

By: mwarden

mwarden — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 17:08:12 +0000

WordPress has completely killed comment spam on my blog. It has a blacklist, a whitelist, and a moderation queue. Basically, I can blacklist certain terms and comments with greater than x links (or send them to the moderation queue instead of rejecting them outright). Then, I can set it to allow comments to bypass the moderation queue if the poster has had a comment approved before. I believe this is based on email address, which is required to post comments but is never displayed.

Requiring the email address is kind of a hassle, but I don’t think it’s so bad that people can’t stand it. They really only have to type it in once, too, if they use the ‘remember me’ feature.