I like blog comments. I understand why some folks don’t turn on the comments functionality in their blogs, either because of the humongous number of comments they’d get, or because they’re really all about broadcasting info out, not dialoging about it, or because they’ve had Bad Experiences with yahoos in their comments sections.<\/p>\n
The latter option seems to be becoming more systemic, and, in fact, blog comment spammers are beginning to crop up like crabgrass<\/a>.<\/p>\n As potentially attractive as some sort of massive blacklist system for MT <\/a>(et al.) would be, the failure of such to work in the e-mail arena is not promsing. Besides which, it’s a heck of a lot of work.<\/p>\n I could go for some simpler solutions<\/a>, and, in some cases, have (and will go for more of them once the problem crops up here). <\/p>\n The underlying message here is, I think, a valuable one: viruses (spam and spammers, too) only spread when there are sufficiently similar systems for them to spread by<\/i>. Everyone’s e-mail works the same way, so e-mail spam is easy. The majority of Windows systems are configured the same (often with the same security holes left unpatched), so virus propagation through Windows systems is easy. MT comment systems are all configured roughly the same way, so spamming through MT comments is easy. And if it’s easy, it will happen.<\/p>\n The alternative is a comment registration system. I have no problem with that, but a lot of folks seem to think it will hinder free exchange of dialogical goodness on the Net<\/a>. That seems unlikely (at least on a relatively small and sedate community like this one); a bigger problem is coming up with a registration system that is both easy and difficult to automate for a spambot.<\/p>\n A solution that does inhibit discussion is a comment queue<\/a>, though I could seem some applications for it. Bottom line, though, I don’t want to have to review comments here before they show up. (If nothing else, the interactions between commenters is usually valuable).<\/p>\n Another after-the-fact solution is a way to clean up spam comments. A couple <\/a>of hacks <\/a>to MT give you an option through the comment notification e-mail. I might implement that, if need be (it’s actually not a bad solution for some other problems, too.)<\/p>\n Some other good summaries on this problem, and possible solutions, here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n And, of course, I’m sure we’ll hear more about it in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I like blog comments. I understand why some folks don’t turn on the comments functionality in their blogs, either because of the humongous number of comments they’d get, or because…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8873,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2006\/03\/31\/comments.html","url_meta":{"origin":4224,"position":0},"title":"Comments","author":"***Dave","date":"Fri 31-Mar-06 9:09pm","format":false,"excerpt":"My blogging client, ecto, is occasionally default to Comments = None mode when making posts. Thus, occasionally posts seem closed to comments. Since I think I have posted only a...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":978,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2001\/10\/29\/and_the_hits_ju.html","url_meta":{"origin":4224,"position":1},"title":"And the hits just keep on coming …","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 29-Oct-01 7:21am","format":false,"excerpt":"Came in this morning to find that I had a wide variety (for me, at least) of comments to my posts. Comments are neat. Hit counts are neat, but comments...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5416,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2004\/03\/15\/technical_diffi.html","url_meta":{"origin":4224,"position":2},"title":"Technical difficulties","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 15-Mar-04 11:03am","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm still having occasional difficulties (though seeming to increase over time) with comments not getting saved, saved comments not getting rebuilt, and attempts to save comments resulting in a \"No...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":38823,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2013\/09\/27\/shutting-down-comments-on-popular-science.html","url_meta":{"origin":4224,"position":3},"title":"Shutting down comments on "Popular Science"","author":"***Dave","date":"Fri 27-Sep-13 4:55pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Hrm.On the one hand, the immediate feel is, \"Hey, great way to suppress discussion.\" Which is kind of silly, because there's eleventy-dozen ways to discuss any PopSci article without ethically requiring them to maintain a comments section.Further, I do agree, from a personal perspective, that contentious comments can stain overall\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10870,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/06\/08\/comments_feed.html","url_meta":{"origin":4224,"position":4},"title":"Comments feed","author":"***Dave","date":"Fri 8-Jun-07 5:26pm","format":false,"excerpt":"I've added a new RSS Comments feed for those who prefer to keep track of things that way (or want to keep track of comments for a given post without...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":19817,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2011\/01\/11\/o-wad-some-pow%e2%80%99r-the-giftie-gie-us.html","url_meta":{"origin":4224,"position":5},"title":"O wad some Pow\u2019r the giftie gie us …","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 11-Jan-11 1:53pm","format":false,"excerpt":"I have it on good authority (on the Internet, so it must be true!) that I am ... \"Another lefty, railing on a topic he does not understand.\" Clearly the type that there are high odds against \"any comments that contradict his point of view actually getting past moderation.\" Someone\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4224\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}