Baked beans, spam spam and spam.
Hey all. My site has recently been inundated by endless spam messages. And by endless, I mean upwards of 5ooo messages a day. I have a personally crafted spam filter that grabbed lots of them, but recently I’ve been running into spam that has crept past that filter, and it’s been … annoying. Like, I’ve needed to devote hours to combing through the spam to see if there’s any real messages in there.
To deal with this, I’ve been tightening my filter. I just wanted to notify people, in case you write a message and it doesn’t actually post to the site. It doesn’t mean that I hate you, or that you posted something unacceptable. It just means that you used a word or phrase that triggered my increasingly touchy spam filter.
In particular, most of the spam coming my way now has to do with medicine and the medical community (specifically the obtaining of medicine through somewhat nefarious online means) and so my filter’s been set to boot almost all messages that refer to anything medicine-related. There may be some casualties due to this – real comments filtered out erroneously – but I had to err on the side of more filtering. Sorry.
It’s either apply a heavy filter or make everyone do one of those ‘I am not a robot’ tests every time they post, and that’s no fun for anyone.
How about a combination of the two? If you trip the filter, apply the captcha so that real people can still post.
That would be cool, but I don’t think WordPress does that. Or it would require a special plugin that I don’t have.
Understood
I’ve tried to avoid blocking regular words that anyone might possibly use, but I did have to make some exceptions. Particularly the word describing a medicine store that rhymes with ‘larmacy’. I just couldn’t avoid blocking it. It was contained in 95% of the spam I was getting.
“Baked beans are off!”
No worries, but “one of those ‘I am not a robot’ tests” wouldn’t be a problem either.
I want to keep things as simple as possible for people. I like the idea of people just typing a comment and letting it fly. More steps, I think, dissuade from the ease of commenting. So anything I can do on the back end to stop the spam but allow the comments is good by me.
The new filter is mostly working, though. In the past three hours, it has successfully filtered out 1,508 spam comments. I’m proud of my craftsmanship.
1500 comments, yikes.
Good work on the filter.
I got 7000 spam comments just yesterday. It’s crazy.
Why not put a password in the comic to post? The bots can’t read. Come up with a filter for placing the word in the artwork. Pierro? does it with aliens, pies and eyeballs I think.
Not sure how they do that (some fancy plugin, most likely), but it’s possible. There are lots of various tools I could use to totally eliminate spam, but they all provide some sort of barrier. I’d rather have people just able to type their message in and be done with it. I always like to keep accessibility open. And the spam filter is largely doing its job. Like today, I received upwards of 7000 spam messages. 33 got through. I can sort 33 by hand with little difficulty. It’s just harder when there’s thousands.
That’s an impressive filter.
Handcrafted. Every time a message gets through, I parse it out and identify components I can filter. So it keeps getting more effective. Today it caught 10,000 spam messages and let 20 through. I hope to get it down to letting only one or two through.
The problem with keyword comparisons is the high rate of false positives, which would mean that a human needs to review the blocked emails after all, like my last attempt to post to this thread with all sorts of potential keywords used by bad actors.
Well, I have a professional system that edits the messages now too. So I don’t have many to sort through now.
By the Power Of Patreon (and Greyskull) I view Tomorrow’s Comic and lo – it is good.
Very good!
(But is the very last bubble missing an “of”?)
It is. Gotta fix that.
Satan was smart enough to escape the messy, moist, smelly baby. Or did he just get lucky?
He’s never smart enough. For anything.
A site I moderate is getting good results by blocking anything hosted by the Kyivstar network out of the (Russian-controlled part of) Ukraine. Hundreds and hundreds of attempts. Dunno if it works the same on WordPress, but trying blocking the hostname “*.broadband.kyivstar.net”
I’ve decided to bite the bullet and pay for Akismet, which is a professional anti-spam filter for WordPress. It costs money, but it works very well and saves me the trouble of poring through spam to figure out ways to block it. It seems to work well for me so far.
It saddens me how easily someone can keep others “from having nice things.” Like a peaceful inbox, e.g. Sorry to hear!
Also: Jenner wept.
Well, I now pay for a pro filter service, so the nice thing is back again.
But, but, I’m a real person. I swear that I am a real flesh and blood person manually typing out these words using my inefficient flesh-covered bone-supported fingers with not stack overflows at all.
In your case, I believe you.
Good. In that case, let us talk together about our lack of servo units in our joint structures.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1530:_Keyboard_Mash
Sorry, I couldn’t resist the joke. I did for as long as I could.
The toon above makes me wonder what people see when they look at Daphine and Puck. Puck I could believe people think “Cos Player” and reason she is out of a job but Daphine?
They see someone else’s problem. That’s why they pay no attention.
Just dont ban “meat popsicle”
Also imagine my shock Daffy is a coward. But then again most bullies are at heart. That’s why when you stand up to them or beat their ass’s they leave you alone afterwards.
I bet the DJ knows “Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats. 😉
~shakes his head while laughing~ You know, I said it but never expected it to happen. Still…hooray for Phoebe and Papa Schnorf!
And in refence to Phoebe’s Baroness costume am I right that 90% of most boys in the 80s saw that as their first knowledge of the female form in cartoons?
You’re probably right. But in honesty, as a boy who grew up in the 80’s, I didn’t really take much note of the Baroness. She was just the token villain girl on the show. For one thing, the Toei-animated cartoon tended to downplay the ‘femme fatale’ presentation of the character. And another thing, as a kid, I always found the glasses and the disapproving glare and the foreign accent to give her a sort of ‘angry substitute teacher’ vibe. I felt no pull at my heartstrings then.
To be honest (and many an 80’s boy child can vouch for this), we all know what cartoon female form first made us feel funny inside: Princess Daphne from ‘Dragon’s Lair’. That game. Was. RIDICULOUS.
Well, great minds obviously think alike. Or weird minds think alike. Or … something.
I noticed something. The unnamed lovely girl in purple looks very much like Phoebe (same hair shape, ears, nose, dimple under mouth and figure. If there was a Halloween party and is she was dressed as a devil you would think the two of them were sisters! And no the artist does not draw all women to look alike like some professional comics artists!
Well, yeah. That’s pretty accurate. I try not to draw my characters to all look the same, but when it comes to minor characters, I do tend to fall back on my standard stockpile of facial components. I will often change the hair style or skin color or height to differentiate between the characters, but the similarities cannot be denied.
::::::time to pull Glenn from the Matrix. He is becoming aware::::