well that's impressive
Meta
An hour and a half after I turn comments back on, I get comment spammed. So because I'm still using MovableType, I've installed the Bayesian filter for MT.
Can't really say how effective it is at the moment - I need to train it first - but at least it has a sane interface for deleting comments. Imagine this: a list of the latest 20 comments, a tick box next to each one and a "Delete" button. Such luxury! I still need to rebuild the entire site after deleting any, but hey, this is MT.
PS: You may have noticed the map at the bottom of the left-hand gutter on Volition's pages. If you're wondering what it is, wonder no longer. It is a nifty little service that charts where people hitting my blog are coming from. Yes, dear reader, you are located at one of those red dots. Click to zoom. Cool stuff.
Comments
So, how effective has the Bayesian filter been? I'm considering adding it to my MT blog. I finally took down all comments out of frustration when I started getting flooded. :P
Posted by: gw on December 14, 2004 09:49 AM
It worked pretty well, but I ended up disabling it after implementing preview-once (see http://volition.vee.net/archives/000467.html).
On the positive side, you can use it to cause spam positive comments to not appear on the post at all and it does provide a much better interface than MT 2.x for deleting comments.
But the negatives were too great in the end. First, it needs to be trained and filtering being what it is, you will always get false positives and false negatives. False positives are annoying because the comment doesn't appear on a post until after you have picked the error up and fixed it. This greatly disturbs the conversations that occur in the comments of a post.
Also, even though it prevented genuine comment spam from being published, those comments still needed to purged from MT's database. Given I was getting around 20-30 spams per day, it was a big waste of my time having to go through and clean them out every day, even with the improved comment list. The user interface for the comment list needs some improvement as well - it isn't very intuitive.
In the end, preview-once works much better because it prevents the comments from being posted in the first place (for now).
Posted by: Mike on December 14, 2004 10:31 AM
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