Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Comment away!

12:37 PM / Web / Comments1 Comment

Web

As mentioned in my previous post, a couple of days ago I enabled the TypePad AntiSpam spam protection system. It actually comes installed by default on recent Movable Type builds and only requires that you apply for a free API Key, but I didn't realise this until recently.

In the couple of days that it's been enabled, I've seen my incoming spam cut drastically thanks to the system's adaptive nature: it actually learns what you report as spam and rejects future incoming comments that are similar or come from the same source. Now that I feel reasonably confident that it's not rejecting legitimate comments, I've decided to leave it enabled for the time being.

Because TypePad AntiSpam is proving to be so much more effective than the SpamLookup system I was reliant on before, I no longer have a massive pile of junk to wade through every day, so I've decided to re-enable immediate comment posting on a trial basis, bypassing the need for me to manually approve every message that comes through. Obviously, if I end up being inundated with spam, I'll turn moderation back on, but I'm hoping I don't have to: I'd much rather have the immediacy of people being able to post a comment and know that it will show up straight away (unless it accidentally gets tripped up by the anti-spam software and sent to me for moderation).

 
1 Comment

1. David S.H. said:

Good to see the Ant Spam seems to be working, having an old hotmail account I'm very familiar with spam. Although at least most of it gets filtered out to its own folder, I'm always have to browse through the emails about my penis, fake facbook, correspondences from Obama's office to make sure any legit ones have got caught in the net.

(Posted on Wednesday, December 22, 2010 at 2:48 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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