Thursday, July 1, 2010

Spamalot

5:07 PM / Web / Comments6 Comments

Web

I've been receiving rather a lot of spam comments recently. Spam has been an issue for this site almost from the get-go, but I've tended to take care of it simply by deleting messages as and when they appear, and more recently implementing a "comment freeze" on all entries over a month old. In the last week or so, however, the volume of spam has increased quite noticeably. So far, I've been doing a reasonable job of keeping it under control by checking my inbox regularly and deleting any dodgy entries more or less immediately. If the volume becomes any heavier, though, this is unlikely to remain feasible.

Because of this, I have had no choice but to enable moderation for ALL comments that are posted. I'm sorry to have to do this, because I've always liked the "real-time" nature of simply letting comments be posted instantly (unless flagged as suspect by Movable Type's anti-spam filters), but that's the way it is. I'll do my best to be as prompt as possible when it comes to approving any comments, and hope that this doesn't discourage you from posting as frequently as before.

One benefit of this new approach, it must be said, is that, because it no longer serves any purpose, I've disabled the "comment freeze", so you will now be able to comment on entries that are older than one month. Every cloud, as they say...

 
6 Comments

1. FoxyMulder said:

Thats what i do.

Does any contain the i.p. number 193.107.16.77 ?

(Posted on Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 7:02 PM)

2. Author Profile Page Michael said:

I'm not sure, as I permanently delete all spam that comes in and generally don't take much notice of IP addresses, as the messages originate from a multitude of different sources. I'll keep an eye out for that one, though - have you had a lot originating from it?

(Posted on Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 7:21 PM)

3. FoxyMulder said:

A huge number and almost every day, the last 3 digits sometimes change but the rest remain the same.

You should check out high definition digest forum,talking about Predator on that thread and i suggested to someone they need to calibrate their tv because they likely have the sharpness too high, they retorted the sharpness is at 48 almost half way and they did calibrate.

It would be funny if it wasn't so depressing to think studio's might do this to more films.

(Posted on Friday, July 2, 2010 at 12:26 AM)

4. Christopher D. Jacobson said:

Good to hear the comment freeze is done away with, at least. There are times when I wish to comment on an old thread (even if nobody but Michael sees it, I suppose, ha ha).

(Posted on Friday, July 2, 2010 at 1:47 AM)

5. Direcow said:

I've had a lot of success with Akismet on wordpress, have you ever thought of switching platforms? It might help some.

(Posted on Friday, July 2, 2010 at 8:16 AM)

6. David S.H. said:

Man I hate spam, I get so many viagra, adult versions of popular sites, fake facebook, lottery wins, money transfer etc emails.
My hotmail is set to send to junk as default, so I have to approve every address. I usually just tick the all box in junk folder, and mark as phishing scam. I have a feeling its as useless as Microsoft's error report system though.

(Posted on Sunday, July 4, 2010 at 8:25 PM)

 
To combat spam, commenting is automatically disabled on entries older than 30 days.

Did a comment you tried to post accidentally get eaten by the spam filter? It happens from time to time. I get upwards of 200 spam comments every day and unfortunately don't have the time to weed through all of them in case something genuine ended up there by mistake. If one of your posts gets incorrectly flagged as spam, email me at m.r.mackenzie[at]gmail[dot]com and I'll do my best to retrieve it.

 
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