Comments on: Oddments from Planet Debian

By: MJ Ray

MJ Ray — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 09:54:34 +0000

I’m using TypePad AntiSpam (akismet-like without discrimination against commercial use) along with a home-made multi-blog comment moderator for Wordpress-MU that I will release Real Soon Now.

By: Jeff Licquia

Jeff Licquia — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 18:42:46 +0000

FWIW, your comment was “borderline” because you had JavaScript disabled. I may need to look into how effective that plugin is, too.

Spam Karma is now orphaned, which has put me in the market for a better comment spam filter for WordPress. Any recommendations?

By: MJ Ray

MJ Ray — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 10:32:02 +0000

Right. My comments on Spam Karma are on http://mjr.towers.org.uk/blog/2006/blogmoves#commentimg “If that’s the Spam Karma 2 mentioned in the footer, I suspect someone will be reincarnated as flame-roasted tinned meat soon.” It’s been around ages, it’s a broken design and removing/avoiding it has been a nice little earner for me over the last year.

Can you see why it fired for my comment, which was pretty much as above? Hardly borderline spam, was it? Thanks for disabling it.

By: The Licquia Blog » Blog Archive » Comment Policy Updated: No More CAPTCHA

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 23:12:54 +0000

[...] when a commenter on my last post expressed his dissatisfaction with my CAPTCHA, I decided it was time to turn it off. And so, references to it have been expunged from my [...]

By: Jeff Licquia

Jeff Licquia — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:25:24 +0000

Oh, I see; my CAPTCHA is a more-or-less correct implementation of a bad idea. I thought maybe I had an incorrect implementation of a bad idea.

Yes, I knew about it before. My CAPTCHA is part of the Spam Karma plugin for WordPress; it only fires for “borderline” comments. After reading about the CAPTCHA industry in India, and considering how few spams are really borderline enough to trigger it, I disabled it.

By: MJ Ray

MJ Ray — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 16:32:38 +0000

Heh. Well, it’s a less severe case of the Blogger.com problems, so just borrow the first link, OK?

Seriously, I’ve not seen it yet on Wordpress blogs that I’ve installed and the message isn’t in the source code that I’ve grepped, so I think it’s probably some common plugin like Akismet (commercial use not allowed IIRC, so non-free). You must know what it is – your comment policy says “my site may present commenters with a set of letters and numbers in a funny-looking image” [and sod people with poor eyesight...]

By: Jeff Licquia

Jeff Licquia — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 14:28:02 +0000

I feel left out. No link for my buggy captcha?

Seriously, more info would be appreciated. This would be the first I’ve heard of it.

By: MJ Ray

MJ Ray — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:04:52 +0000

I didn’t see the “Discussion” link at the top of the page before, but clicking it and then “Edit” gets a long “Waiting for madduck.net” from the browser followed by “You need to log in first” followed by “login failed, perhaps you need to turn on cookies?” (which should have been mentioned on the login screen) and then I got bored, so I’m calling that not fully working.

By: martin f. krafft

martin f. krafft — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 11:57:23 +0000

My blog has a comment system. Anyway, delayed reboots have their own set of problems. What I *should* have done is add an explicit route to some other machine out there to guard against that case in the future. This is now in place on all of my machines (as well as a route to the IPv6 tunnel peers).