Having apparently defeated the Trackback spammers with the (unsought but still welcome) assistance of Scott’s domain host, we now seem to be under concerted attack by a renewed and virulent form of comment spam. At the moment it appears that MT blacklist doesn’t delete thes spam comments. For some reason you have to go through and delete them manually one by one. I’m about to go and delete yet another group of them (the third lot this afternoon), which will probably take me more time than I’ve got before my 5pm tutorial.
I’m hoping Scott can have a look at this and do something about it, otherwise we may have to look at disabling comments completely (as Tim Dunlop was forced to do not long ago) and look at shifting to WordPress (as people have been suggesting for a while). Trouble is, it’s Scott’s domain and I have neither the access rights nor expertise to implement WordPress. Maybe Scott could phone me on my mobile when he reads this (I’ve lost your mobile number or I’d phone you).
Why didn’t you just Wicky an email, Ken?
Why don’t you just institute a Turing code like everyone else? I haven’t had a single spam comment since (a few trackbacks though).
Sam
I don’t have either access to Scott’s domain or the exertise to implement a Turing Code even if I did. I gather Scott tired to do so at one stage, but found he couldn’t. If you (or anyone else) is willing to assist Scott with implementing a Turing Code, I’d be really really really grateful, because this spam is getting almost impossibly disruptive.
We do need to talk about this. I been dozing this afternoon, so I’ll have a chat with you about it on the weekend some time.
I don’t think WordPress is an ideal solution, either. I tried having a personal blog with WP, and I found that it is spammed just as bad. Easier to fix, mind you, but still very annoying.
Anyway, Ken and I will put our heads together at some point this weekend and try and figure out a long term solution.
Scott, I’ve been running WP with the Spam Words and Spaminator plugins and have only had 3 spam comments in the last six months. (I turned off trackbacks a while ago after receiving a TB spam, but that’s only because WP1.2 doesn’t filter TBs; WP1.5 treats them as comments and they’re filtered just the same.) If you have concerns about spam and WordPress, I suggest contacting Miss Piss of Piss’n’Vinegar, as she was most helpful when I was trying to work out what plugins were most effective.
You could try scoop;
http://scoop.kuro5hin.org/
as a non-standard solution. It gets little comment spam as most is aimed at more popular blog software. Most spam I have gotten is manual!
Scoop doesnt have the MT/WP style of anonymous comments, but you could add that if you wanted it. It wouldnt be hard, would only require some Perl knowledge to add a box/block.
Scoop is a pretty good system, though it’s squarely aimed at many-to-many interactions, not one-to-many or few-to-many. So on the plus side it has sophisticated user features, threaded and nested commenting etc. On the downside you need to fiddle to reapproach the “blog” format: turn of the story voting queue, diaries etc etc.
I see you used it for South Sea Republic though. I imagine you’d be just to fella to walk Ken and Scott through the customisation (I haven’t looked at it seriously since 0.6).
Jacques, Between the Group and Section permissions it is pretty easy to turn off the ability to publish stories for the users and anonymous groups.
It is also easy to ensure they publish to the front page. That would make it a blog style few-to-many system. Rather than the open-ended community style of k5.
I suspect this is what dailykos/redstate have done to make their sites “bloggish”.
I also prefer scoop because it uses Perl, rather than PHP, as its development language. You tend to find that Perl hackers are better than PHP types, simply because PHP is so easy and Perl takes a while to really “get”, past the deceptively easy early phase. With PHP the deceptive ease is all you ever get. Everything else is just grunt code.
Just browse around CPAN and you’ll see what I mean. It’s software modularism without keyword hype and overwrought component models (like COM, XPCOM, CORBA, UNO and their like). It Just Works.
Sorry – got a bit off topic!
Ken, if you’re up for the challenge, Scoop is a good alternative. It’s very scalable and very flexible. However as I say and as Cam more closely explained, it requires some adjustment of the default configuration to become blog-like, rather than the many-to-many background it grew out of at Kuro5hin.org .