RM: Removing Comments?

I'm an avid reader of the blog and i frequently post comments. This morning i posted 2 comments about your Opaque Apple article (one about Apple's behaviour being similar to 1984 and the other about my experiences with Panic and OmniGroup), and when I checked out the site tonight both comments had been removed. What's up? Did I say something offensive?

Kind of ironic that when you are talking about Apple removing posts from their discussion forums that the same should happen to you readers...

I rarely, rarely delete comments. I can count the times I've done it on one hand, and in at least one of the cases I just edited one part out that I just didn't want on the site and noted that I'd done so. I don't mind if comments are negative, even towards me -- if a comment does get deleted, it's generally crossed the line in a major, major way.

This was a casualty of my comment spam, and I still had his comments and manually added them back in. The problem was his website is a subdomain of atspace.com, and apparently some comment spammers are using accounts on that service. When you're blocking comment spammers, you don't generally add vioxx.atspace.com.

Subdomains are worthless to block, as they'll generally pick one free hosting domain, or a domain they own, and use a bunch of different keyword variants in front of it. Usually the freakiest type of porn you can imagine or different types of medicines.

I do try to be careful, especially when I'm adding in a new regex (because I suck at them) but there are something like 3,000 comments on the site. When you're dealing with this many spams, false positives are going to happen and things might get deleted that shouldn't. When you're deleting a page of 25 spams that have snagged the filters, especially before coffee, things can start to blur together.

I believe it's happened fewer times than I've actually removed a comment, so it's not a likely occurrence (hopefully), but if it does let me know and I'll try to rectify it. It sucks, it shouldn't be the way it is, but that's the way it is.

Posted by drunkenbatman
February 19, 2005, at 04:28 PM

Comments ⁽⁴⁾

Posted by: Oliver at February 19, 2005 04:46 PM

lol

Well thanks for clearing that up. I feel a lot better knowing the comments I write will actually be read by someone. It makes me feel like the time I spend skiving off doing my work is not going completely to waste...

I should really get a proper domain for my site but the cash is just too tight at the moment.

Posted by: SirG3 at February 19, 2005 06:19 PM

DB (I hope this sounds coherent ;-)) -> you're talking about the URL field? Couldn't Oliver get a dyndns name ( http://dyndns.org ) and have it redirect to his site?

-- SirG3

Posted by: drunkenbatman at February 19, 2005 06:29 PM

DB (I hope this sounds coherent ;-)) -> you're talking about the URL field?

Yessir.

Couldn't Oliver get a dyndns name ( http://dyndns.org ) and have it redirect to his site?

Yessir, but in this case it's not really necessary. Once I figured out what was going on, I just removed that entry from the blacklist. Generally, when someone smacks your blog, there'll be several different URL domains mentioned (along with subdomains) and those existed to take care of that batch. Normally I would have caught that I was adding a larger well-known hosting domain -- I blame the grogginess of the early dawn.

I don't foresee his web hosting provider staying in the blacklist, as otherwise I'd have to ban geocities and tripod and a host of others. :)

Posted by: taultunleashed at January 24, 2006 12:05 AM

There are other ways to curb comments. One is to dissable comments after xx time. Another is to add some kind of authentication or even registration. This greatly reduces the comments by commenters. Finally you can even do some kind of comment filtering to avoid common unwanted wordings.

Just my 2c.

DrunkenBlog