Feel the Burn
March 16th, 2007 — 3:21 pm —Among the features added today is support for Feedburner RSS feeds. We’ve updated the RSS feed address for slate info so we ask that you subscribe to the Feedburner feed. If you are the owner of a blog running in slate and want to use Feedburner to keep track of subscribers let us know and we’ll get you hooked up with an account.
While we’re on the topic of blogs I’d like to quickly touch on the issue of spam. We took a look at the database today (backing it up before loading up the new version of slate) and we were really surprised. We launched our first blog on December 15th. We’ve had 2500+ comments in that time. A vast, vast majority of them spam. I think at least half of our comments so far have been spam. One of the new features we’ve added is the ability to delete comments so hopefully our users will be able to keep their article comment area somewhat neater. I’m just surprised by how much of a problem this is.
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I’ve updated the feed to use Feedburner.
Spam is probably the most annoying thing about allowing public interaction with your content or application. It’s absolutely relentless. 1250+ comments in 3 months is a ton. Does your comment moderation require manual approval? The optional comment key was a good idea. I once built a moderated commenting system that required manual approval, but it was accept/decline forever, based on the email.
I don’t fully understand how the “spammers” bring in the comments, so I don’t know the best way to prevent it. It seems like some solutions work in some cases, but fail in others.
Askimet says 95% of all content they filter is spam, which is absolutely absurd. Of course, it’s probably the same percentage for filtered e-mails.
I would like to have some type of blacklist, but I’d do it based on IP most likely. I’ve also thought about looking for certain words and filtering based on that, but either approach would have its own flaws. But I guess spam keeps people in business. It’s like we used to say at the TSC “if it weren’t for spyware, we’d probably be out of a job,” since 90% of our work was in spyware removal.
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