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« Business and Craft in Animation..and the World | Main | Why Crime Pays »

March 22, 2004

Comment-Spam Update

Dear Friedrich --

Sad to report, but we've hit a small landmark. We've now banned over 200 evil IP addresses from posting comments on our blog -- well, really, from comment-spamming us.

There oughta be a law. Well, maybe not. But some tactical nuke-ing would suit me fine.

Best,

Michael

posted by Michael at March 22, 2004




Comments

Yeah. I was just thinking this morning about how spammers are the scum of the earth. Nothing particularly profound, just general hatred and wondering what kind of despicable people are behind it all.

Posted by: . on March 22, 2004 11:17 AM



Agree completely. Now imagine my outrage this morning, when I opened my mailbox and received a spam, asking ME, if I'm a spammer - apparently my address was included on some online spammers list!

Posted by: Tatyana on March 22, 2004 11:28 AM



It used to drive me nuts, a few years ago when I would get maybe two spams a day. But oddly enough, now that I get one every minute or so, it doesn't bother me anymore.

You just need a good Bayesian filter. For those who don't know, this type of program works by running statistics on the type of words that normally occur in your spam, and filtering based on those words. "Your spam" means anything you designate as spam; there's usually a separate button for "delete" and "delete spam." So the more spam you get, the better your filter becomes.

I don't know if there's something like that for filtering blog comments, but there probably will be before long.

Posted by: Jacob on March 22, 2004 12:56 PM



We just use the delete key in our house, less maintanence keeping it updated :-)

Posted by: David Mercer on March 22, 2004 3:16 PM



The folks over at Samizdata.net have a solution that you might be interested in. You have to punch in a 6 digit number each time you want to comment. It sounds a little clunky, but it seems to be getting the job done for them.

Posted by: Cody on March 22, 2004 9:19 PM






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