(And I hope comments are too!)
One of the things that makes spam such a pain in the ass in blogging is the way it increasingly tends to inhibit the ability to discuss ordinary topics. If you have been blogging for any length of time (I’m going on eight years now), you have no doubt been dragged into battle against these insidious spambots, and forced to deploy defensive software which often relies on blocking certain words and phrases in the hope of preventing spam comments.
A classic example from my personal experience was the way my anti-spam software was blocking the word “cialis” in any comment. Now, normally I can live with a limitation like that, and so can most commenters, because the topic of “cialis” is not a frequent one here. (In fact I don’t think I have ever talked about it as a substance.) But what happened was I kept getting email from different people who could not leave comments, and could not figure out what was wrong. I had to painstakingly try entering one of the comments, editing out one word at a time until I found the offending word:
socialism
Yes, socialism is offensive, but I never wanted a ban on the word! In fact, I have used it in countless posts. I kept staring and staring, and finally I figured out what was wrong: my software considered “socialism” to be containing “cialis.” Which it does. So I had to adjust my settings to allow socialism, and since then socialism has been welcome at Classical Values. (Er, you know what I mean.)
M. Simon learned that writing about pornography is also very problematic, because if the word “porn” is in the title, any and all comments are blocked! And we can’t have that can we? So the workaround was to use a zero in place of the letter “o.” But the spammers already do that to get their p0rn spam through, so there’s no perfect solution.
What set me off about this was to learn from SayUncle that writing a blog post using the word “prescription” now presents spamblematic problems.
You do a post with the word prescription in it, and wordpress thinks all comments are spam.
Fortunately in this case, I don’t use WordPress, but MovableType, which I just upgraded, but which is still not perfect. Had I been using WordPress, though, I’d have probably been reduced to fits by now, as I have writtten a number of posts about the unconstitutional (IMO) prescription drug databases which have been stealthily sneaked through most of the state legislatures at the behest of an elite group of public policy wonks. Which means that the cops can rifle through grandma’s medical records and treat her like a suspected drug dealer, because some damn welfare grandma in some damn Ohio town learned she could make a lot of money selling her damn pain meds.
I like to discuss these and other things without worrying that I’m inadvertently becoming an auto-spamming trap.
Damn those spammers.
MORE: Speaking of damn spammers, I just discovered why a series of important emails on an important subject requesting advice from a friend had gone uncharacteristically “unanswered.”
They weren’t unanswered, but for no reason at all, my friend (with whom I have been in regular correspondence for some time) was suddenly deemed a spammer, and all of his replies were automatically junked. And meanwhile I spent days worrying why my friend would all of a sudden not answer me.
This leaves me incredibly pissed off — first at Verizon but most of all at the spammers, who are making it ever more difficult to communicate.
Yeah, yeah, I should regularly check the spam folder, just as I should regularly and constantly be checking everything else.
Why bother to have a spam folder if you have to read through it anyway?
Things have reached the point where spam is consuming a lot of time.
I am so angry that I am willing to consider a constitutional amendment adding a spammer exception to the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.
They should be rendered mentally and/or physically incapable of spamming.
Comments
8 responses to “Socialism and prescription porn welcome here!”
cialis! prescripti0n p0rn! cheap! lowest prices!
(I can act like a spammer at my own blog, can’t I?)
Funny you should mention that. I just sent 3 comments that passed the filter into the spam bucket.
I can’t figure how they passed since they were filled with links. And not just bare links but fully formatted ones –
I put “<a href….” into the last comment as an example and it got ignored. This time I coded it for display.
Has anyone come up with a spam blocker that can scan a post and alter its filters to allow comments to use the words contained in the post itself?
That would be a good trick, guy – I’d even buy one of those.
I’ve been using WP since I had a bit of a fight with MT (no, not going to elucidate on that) owners. But I did run across that c*alis thing, back in the early days. And it drove me bats. Removing it left me with lots of c*alis spam. Leaving it in… well, I had to monitor and say “not spam” at the “please moderate this comment” level constantly.
I finally gave up on the WP ban list (mostly–I still leave some in there that I’m never going to talk about – and that don’t make partial words.) Nowadays, there are lots of good anti-spam plugins that help a lot.
Sadly, I guess you need registration. I prefer not registering anywhere, not leaving little tidbits of me anywhere.
But I sure can see where you’re coming from, which is why I thought of registration.
It would be so freaking simple to have ISPs charge 1 cent per email…..
Feel your pain.
I think Bill Johnson’s suggestion that you register users is probably a good one. It’s a minor PITA, but probably better than (say) allowing commenters to easily impersonate each other.
I think the ultimate solution, rather than any kind of filtering, is to disallow connections to your server from insecure (i.e. spammy) networks. Technology to do this for email is mature; I imagine something similar could be done for a web server but I haven’t kept up on the latest. The you just need a blacklist of insecure networks, and your web site goes dark for all customers on those networks.
The reason that’s a better approach is (a) you no longer need filters, which obviously don’t work for you, and (b) spammers have to change ISPs to get to you. If all reputable web sites used this approach, eventually, and without government intervention, the spammers would find themselves on a separate network from the rest of us, able only to spam each other.
Innocent people whose ISPs happen to be spammy would of course be inconvenienced. But they should be taking their business to a reputable ISP anyway, and driving the spammy ISP out of business.
Eric, John Ringo summed it up perfectly in We Few. Bear in mind, Roger has committed treason and multiple other high crimes…: