Now With Easier Commenting
Posted by Bill @ 10:51 amIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Speaking of Bloglines, somebody brought it to my attention that they had been unaware I had relaxed my comments restrictions. I got so many complaints about the TypeKey registration that I decided to look into other products to see if they might do a better job at helping me combat comment spam. I finally broke down and went with WordPress despite the fact that I’m still not convinced the authors are on the right track architecture-wise. Anyway, all that tech mumbo-jumbo simply means that if you’ve been reading via Bloglines and haven’t noticed the new software and that commenting no longer requires a TypeKey account . . . now you know.
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COMMENTS / 6 COMMENTS
Easycure added these pithy words on Jul 01 05 at 11:37 amI noticed. Of course, sometimes your security code image is cut off on one side or another. But other than that, no worries from the commenting side of things.
Happy 4th. Win some money….! =)
Nick added these pithy words on Jul 02 05 at 11:07 pmI’ve been using WordPress on several sites for a while now and have been using it since the very early stages, back in the 0.71 days. The way I combat spam is by not allowing a comment to pass through unless the comment author has already has an approved comment. Personally I can’t stand giving readers another hoop to jump through (such as the security code) and as a reader, sometimes I won’t comment on a site just for that reason. :-/ I guess I don’t like to punish my readers for something they didn’t do.
Bill added these pithy words on Jul 05 05 at 12:55 amNick,
Well, I guess it’s one of those perception issues. I think having spambots take over the site making it unusable is worse than requiring a step that was effective in blocking them. It certainly was never intended as a punishment.
Bill
Nick added these pithy words on Jul 05 05 at 8:24 amI definitely see your point Bill. Spammers are a bitch! The way I use WordPress works quite well. I get spam, but it’s all moderated on the admin side. If a commenter has had an approved comment, any future comments automatically go live. If someone hasn’t been approved before, the comment goes into moderation.
Jaxia added these pithy words on Jul 11 05 at 10:23 pmI just had to enter a code. Did you switch back?
I use Wordpress and Bad Behavior plugin. Since I installed Bad Behavior, I haven’t had a SINGLE spam comment. Prior to that, I was getting a lot, and I have a 3 month old site.
Bill added these pithy words on Jul 12 05 at 6:33 amNope. I haven’t changed a thing.
Well, this site has been around in one form or another for 6 or 7 years so you can only imagine the number of attempts
Every time I have used the code entry plugin my comment spam has dropped to zero. I think it’s a fair trade off all things considered. Nearly all of the other plugins I looked at had pluses and minuses and in the end I went with the code validation. Also, as I looked at the technologies being employed on both sides of the battle I thought it would be much harder to parse images and extract characters than it would be to simply find what rules flagged a comment as spam and re-writing one’s bot software to circumvent those rules.
That’s really what most of this comment spam thing comes down to. Every time someone comes up with a defense, the spammers change their tactics. It’s a cat and mouse game. At the moment, it seems that the methodology I’ve used to prevent comment spam is beyond the comment spammer’s ability while many of the Baysean and rules based methods are under constant attack as the comment spammers attempt to circumvent those prevention techniques.
Bill
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