Comments on: Argumentative

By: wry catcher

wry catcher — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 12:52:29 +0000

Okay, just checked — we’re not even using the Askimet plugin!! Which is very basic spam filtering (it’s all I need for my wee, humble blog). I can’t turn it on because I’m not the admin here — we just need to go to “plugins” and activate that one, but we need the API key to do so. Normally that is in the profile, but it’s not here — I think it would be for the admin. So, who’s running this joint? Can we ask Sols or Nom to come turn that plugin on? And to upgrade to newer WP while we’re at it?

By: wry catcher

wry catcher — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 12:47:47 +0000

Yeah, I come on and delete spam, too. Not every day, but pretty often. I use WordPress, too, and I seriously get like one spam a month. We could do something much better than we’re doing now — only I don’t know what it is.

Don’t any of you arguing types know something about this, cuz we will *totally* let you be right.

By: profxm

profxm — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 20:54:18 +0000

I use re-captcha on my website (http://recaptcha.net/plugins/wordpress/). Virtually no spam comments ever. Very nice. Also, how long has it been since we upgraded the version of WordPress running the site? I keep my personal blog updated and it’s pretty clear what is running MSP is an old version.

By: Jonathan Blake

Jonathan Blake — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 18:14:34 +0000

I assume that most of the spam comments are on old posts. That’s what happening on my blog. I had to delete hundreds of spam each week that Akismet caught. I would scan the list to see if any ham got caught by mistake, but it got to be too much. I finally relented and checked the box “Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month”. My Akismet has is pretty well trained by now. I only now see 2-3 spam comments per week that I have to review. Granted, my blog is much humbler than MSP.

By: chanson

chanson — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 14:36:22 +0000

Hellmut — It’s not a question of one or two spammers. It’s that this site has become more popular lately (yay!) hence is attracting way more spam (boo!), about 800 hundred spams a day. The reason you may not have noticed the difference is that I’ve been deleting them by hand every day. That was a reasonable solution back when we were getting no more than a hundred or so per day, but I think we need to install some sort of plugin that will filter them automatically.

By: Hellmut

Hellmut — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 02:14:26 +0000

I just deleted a 1011. Does anyone have code that blocks a spammed poster?

By: chanson

chanson — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 08:22:34 +0000

Nah, those are new ones. It presented me one massive screen to view (and delete) all 850 or so. And since then we got another 400 which I just now deleted — blogging from in the train!

By: Andrew S

Andrew S — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 00:47:17 +0000

Now you’re only down to 218, so it seems you’ve been pretty productive

By: chanson

chanson — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 16:12:32 +0000

Speaking of leaving it alone…

I stepped away from the Internet for a day and a half (because I’m on vacation in Paris and don’t have Internet access — I’m currently imposing on a friend at his apartment), and guess what I found here at MSP? More than 800 spam comments to delete! And I have to at least scroll through the list to make sure there aren’t any real comments among them.

I really need to talk to Hellmut about getting a proper spam control plugin. The site has picked up in popularity, and deleting the spam by hand at this rate is getting a little ridiculous…

By: Andrew S

Andrew S — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 03:14:48 +0000

rebecca, reading your comments inspires me.

And no matter how tempting it is, you just leave it alone.

It is kinda inspiring, because it makes me realize that even without the church (or any church) telling us what is good and what is bad, what is a temptation and what is not, we can still discern these things when we are going on our own paths. So, we can still make meaningful progress and set goals in our lives without having them prescribed by others…

Kinda makes me want to do a new year’s resolution, except I won’t call it a new year’s resolution. We don’t need any opportunity to work at improving ourselves and our characters.