An Architect's View

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An Architect's View

In Moderation

August 5, 2006 · 9 Comments

Updated 8/5/2006 - notifications fixed.
I've finally gotten so sick of those unpleasant comment sp@mm$rs that I've implemented moderation on comments on this blog. Any comments you add need to be approved before they post but I have removed all restrictions on validation of the actual comment so you can now, once again, comment on old entries (a common sp@mm$r trick, it seems) and you can put full URLs in your comments again (although I don't currently auto-format them to actual links). I've also set it up so the moderation email has quick links to approve / delete, for my convenience.
View count: 329

Tags: blogging · personal

9 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Yves // Aug 5, 2006 at 5:46 AM

    I understand..

    I have a drum blog that I've gotten so much spam from that I've had to set my comments for approval.

    Spam sucks.

  • 2 Raymond Camden // Aug 5, 2006 at 7:58 AM

    Sean, I've had a lot of luck with my anti-spam code in BlogCFC. I get a few false positives, and a few slip through, but in general, it works well. I know you don't use blogcfc anymore, but you could easily rip it from my code. It's really nothing more than a dumb keyword check, but it's amazing how many spams come in with the same keywords.

    I don't know about you, but for my blog, my spam tended to come in flavors. So for a long time it was prescription drugs. Now my list is full of drug names. Then it was porn, so I've got all kind of porn keywords (I was shocked by some of those spams).

    Anyway, I just wanted to offer it to you if it will help. It truly is sad that these people are ruining the internet for the vast majority of us.

  • 3 Nathan Dintenfass // Aug 5, 2006 at 9:42 AM

    While you are working on comments, you should consider letting people put a URL in their comments -- it's a simple way for folks to link through to commenters' blogs.

  • 4 Peter J. Farrell // Aug 5, 2006 at 10:07 AM

    One word...LylaCaptcha. Even I think Captcha is not the greatest solution, however it does work and it is works in realtime. ;-) Now I await for my comment to be approved.

  • 5 Sean Corfield // Aug 5, 2006 at 11:04 AM

    @Ray, I'm running a heavily modded version of BlogCFC 3.5.2 so it would be really hard for me to upgrade now, especially since I have a completely custom front end (Fusebox 5).

    @Nathan, good point - now I have moderation in place, I should allow links again!

    @Peter, yes, but I also get human-entered comments I'd rather not have on the blog too :)

  • 6 Tom Chiverton // Aug 7, 2006 at 2:04 AM

    I'd rather see Captcha than moderation.
    Or at least membership, so that regular posters are pre-approved.

    Not that I do either on my blog, so far.

  • 7 John Wilker // Aug 7, 2006 at 8:16 AM

    I built a captcha for my blog that doesn't use typical image captchas. A few make it through, but the simple form posters are blocked completely.

    I've also found that disabling comments after x days (for me 15) kills a ton of spam, since they seem to like to spam the older posts.

  • 8 Sean Corfield // Aug 7, 2006 at 8:17 AM

    Oops! Looks like a bug in the post-approval comment posting code... I've fixed it now!

  • 9 Sean Corfield // Aug 7, 2006 at 8:49 AM

    John, yes, I had turned off comments on entries over three months old... since adding moderation, I've removed that check and, yes, lots of new spam appearing so I might reinstate that...

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