A Message From Management

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Welcome to I, Asshole…I’m the administrator here, and we’re starting to get this ship patched up and running so Asshole can do what she does best, which is write shit that makes milk spew out your nose (even if you’re not drinking milk) and not worry about the technical details.

Seems like comments should be a simple matter. However, since comments post content to the web, it makes it a valuable free “link exchange” for people try to get their C*alis and T*xas-H*oldem sites to be #1 in Google. I understand where they’re coming from, but it makes a tool like a blog with literally hundreds of submission forms in it a big problem.

Movable Type solves the problem by requiring users to register before they can posts, but that kinda sucks, so I’m looking into other solutions. For now, I think I’m going to go ahead and try unmoderated comments for the most recent couple of posts and see how that works.

Try it out and we’ll see how it works. I was reading back through some of Asshole’s old comments, and y’all are pretty funny. I’d hate to see any barrier to that.

thanks,
Daniel

16 thoughts on “A Message From Management”

  2. There’s also some function in there where it makes the spambastards’s links not show up for search engine spiders.

    I dig the idea that when they manage to get through my barriers it’s all for naught.

  4. Using Moveable Type Blacklist blocks a whole lot of spam. The other thing to do is, there’s an MT script that closes comments on all posts that are over two weeks old. Since spammers mostly post on old comments, that blocks a whole lot MORE spam.

    The last trick, the one someone referred to above, is to add a “nofollow” to all links on this blog. There’s an MT script that does that too.

  5. Yeah, that’s the one. I leave my old posts open for comments because I’ve had quite a few really good debates, arguments, or additional info pop up in my comments months (sometimes years) after the initial post, restarting a thread. Had a lot of really stupid crap too, but hey, that’s life.

    It leaves me open for more spam, but I feel it’s worth the extra blog maintainence I have to put in.

  7. Yeah yeah, I’m more than aware of the movabletype plugins available.

    I’ve been struggling with comment spam ever since the spammers found Loverzan:
    http://tinyplace.org/loverzan

    I administer that blog as well, and she started getting comment spam like gangbusters. MT Blacklist was a help, but she was in there every goddamn day messing with it. It got to be such a problem (and MTBlacklist for MT 2.6 isn’t the best interface ever) that it just was a lot of time each week for her.

    Plus, I find that MTBlacklist is SUCH a fucking resource hog, and I’m a little reluctant to use it for that reason. I’m thinking about installing it just as a rudimentary protection and NOT using the default list for it. Just adding common words like: m*rtgage, vi*gra, etc, and blocking URL’s with those terms.

    I probably will add the comment turn-off feature. Sure it’s nice to have little debates in old posts, but exposing basically hundreds of comment forms to the spammers is just a nightmare to me. I do web development for a living, so adding another serious unpaid administration task is like hell!

    SJ’s happy to just have current page comments open, and so am I. I’m going to have her do it manually at first, but then I’ll probably install the plugin. We’ll see how just that goes and take it one step at a time.

    If I have to get medieval and install blacklist and even one of those bayesian-style fuckers I will. But in the meantime I’d rather spend the time I have for Asshole on giving her an “About” page and other slick, worthless gadgets she likes.

  8. And as for nofollow and all that stuff…that’s great, but spammers don’t care. They’ll still submit all their ads anyway, just in case.

  9. Yeah, this is what I see when I read this:

    “Nerd nerd, nerdity nerd nerd SJ, Nerd nerd nerdy. Nerdy nerd nerderson from Nerdport, nerd nerd nerd I, Asshole. Nerd. Nerd!”

    Just kidding! I <3 Nerds!

    (Yeah, I know I am a librarian with a BLOG, who is making fun of people who have actual technical skills. Me go to hell.)

  10. Ahh bugger. It’s the price you pay for being Asshole. I get thousands of comment spams every day for being Pussy. You can imagine how much there was when Asshole and Pussy were on the same server. Tee hee.

  14. I get thousands of comment spams a day because I’m an offensive rightwing nutjob who enjoys pissing people off and for some reason shows up pretty high on the search engines for a ton of strange crap.

    (My personal favorite was showing up as #1 on Google for “where the fuck do I find firewood in Wisconsin”)

  16. I’m really excited that Movable doesn’t block my comments on the grounds that my url contains the highly-toxic character set “x.com”, a simple little nit of text which is apparently enough to make any other blog comment code SHIT ITSELF INSIDE OUT with rage.

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