Another Opinion Among Many

Balance

I’ve been trying to figure out the best balance between Spam filtering and freedom to comment on this site. The day before yesterday, in the evening, I decided to conduct an experiment and see what the results were.

What was here

Before conducting the experiment, I’d been using the same solution that I had before. Akismet and Tan Tan Noodles Simple Spam Filter had been my trusty resistance fighters who tirelessly kept my site pretty much free from comments made by that scourge of the earth known as blog spammers. I’ve been reasonably happy with this dynamic duo as the amount of work required by me was pretty low and people who wanted to could comment freely on this site and see their comment appear right away. I didn’t have to manually approve the comments and the person who commented didn’t have to do anything elaborate to have their comment appear here.

The Experiment

I had decided to see what would happen if I disabled Joe Tan’s Simple Spam Filter.I wanted to know two things – how many comments actually do get moderated because of their spammy nature, and, how many of those comments are legitimate. I’ve been quite lucky so far. About once or twice a week, there’d be a comment added to the list of spam comments in my moderation queue – and, it was put there because it should have been.

As I alluded to with my previous post, I enabled first comment moderation, in case Akismet wasn’t up to the task. Over night, I had received 14 comments that had been sent to the queue and they were all sent there with good reason. They were illegitimate crapola and should have been set on fire and fed to their owners. That part of the experiment seemed to have gone well.

Then, for the bigger risk. I disabled first comment moderation to see if Akismet would handle everything and do it correctly. I didn’t really want to have to go through a pile of comments and delete them from the published site. Over the next 16 or 17 hours, I received 64 comments that were marked as spam. They were waiting for me in the spam queue. I read through them all and determined that they had been legitimately flagged as spam comments.

So, Akismet had saved me from the spammers. This is great! On the face of things, there was no real difference to those who read the content here.

The Conclusion and My Action

I’ve concluded that Akismet can be the only spam moderation solution that you really need on your site. It seems to filter the illegitimate comments properly and doesn’t flag any false positives. The things that get filtered are queued for me to review, if necessary, in case they were put there in error. It does a great job.

I’ve enabled Simple Spam Filter again, though, as the way it works is a great compliment to Akismet. It was not decided as a single solution, but rather a prefilter for Akismet. This task is handled well. With SSF enabled, I don’t have to search through the spam queue to see if any comments there are legitimate. And, don’t kid yourself, if you have a list if quarantined comments, you’ll go through them, just to be sure.

With SSF, comments with more than 5 links get stopped and any comments with Regex code in them gets stopped. As well, comments with words commonly used by spammers are stopped. The good new is that, if someone gets stopped by the filter, they have a chance to moderate their own comment as approved by clicking the button on the page showing them why their comment was blocked. Then, the comment goes through. I don’t have to worry about reading through the Akismet queue often, as the really obvious robot-generated spam is deleted automatically, as the robot doesn’t click the button to allow their comment to be read. Once a spam commenter gets past the SSF by clicking through the first block, they get caught by Akismet. The positive thing for me is that I don’t have to actively pore through several comments just to find out they’re spam and need deleting. The robots’ inaction at the gateway is enough.

The potential is there for every comment to pass SSF, as the moderation is handled by the commenter. I think that this is pretty good evidence that there is a problem. My little site gets more illegitimate comments in one day than the number of articles I publish in a whole year.

This experiment has solidified my feeling that I’ve chosen the best solution for my needs. So, SSF and Akismet remain as my dynamic freedom fighting duo. I did remove a few words from the potential list (ones that I find that I use a lot). I figure that if they’re used by a spammer, Akismet will stop them or SSF will due to them using another tactic that is blocked before publication.

Have you ever done something so boneheaded that you just wish that you could rewind your day?

Today, it snowed and the wind blew (okay, it was yesterday, as its 12:31am and I’m still up).  I don’t know what the snowfall amount ended up as, since its still falling, but I know that the wind blew a lot of it into my driveway.

I left work early today so that I could go home during daylight.  That was the plan, anyways. I went to my car (wading through the snow in the parking lot) and pulled my keys out of my pocket to start the car.  As I pulled the chain out of my pocket, I hit one of the buttons on the remote lock.  I started the car and grabbed my snow brush to clean off the ice and snow from the windows.  I got out of the car and shut the driver’s door and got to the scraping.  Did you catch that? I shut the door.

Yep, I locked the keys inside the car, in the ignition.  My car is locked and running.  My keycard to get back into work is in the car, as I always remove it and store it in the glove box, so that I’ll have it for when I go back to work (and I can lock it in, so its secure).  So, I’m outside in a blizzard, snow pelting me, blurring my glasses and getting me wet, holding my snow brush.

I tried to break into my car with a coat hanger but it wasn’t stiff enough to work the lock or window buttons.  I did this for about an hour without any luck.  It seems that locks are meant to work.

Did I mention that I had no money with me? So, I called my car dealership to see if my “roadside assistance” covered locking your keys in the car.  Apparently not.  So, I told the guy that I had no money so I couldn’t afford to pay a tow truck driver or locksmith to get into my car.  My heart was sunk to the floor at that point.  He raised it a bit by suggesting that I call the towing company that they use and tell them that I’d pay the dealer int he morning.  So, he gave me the phone number and I called the towing company.

Remember, this is a blizzard-like snow storm. Visibility was pretty low and they were busy helping people out of ditches, etc.  It was nearly an hour before they showed up (but he warned me).  So, the tow driver took out a scraper-like device and a slim bladder device to pry the door from the frame of the car by pumping the bladder up, like a blood pressure guage.  he then took his nice doorunlocker rod to push the button to lower the window and he opened the door for me.  Cha-ching!

I followed the snowplow down the highway to home at about 50km/h.  I was pretty bedraggled from the outdoor ordeal, so I concetrated on getting the end of the driveway cleared enough to get the car off the road and lef the rest for later.  I came in and ate and relaxed (recharged, really).  After watching a TV show, I went back outside (in the dark) and finished off the driveway.  I need to have it fairly clear for Saturday, as I’ve got someone coming to service the phone and internet.  I can’t have them wading through 3 feet of snow to do that, now can I?

So now, my rant is over and I am going to bed, only to wake up 5 hours from now.  I’d planned on helping a brewery meet their botom line after work.  I don’t think that I’m going to push their profits over the edge on that much sleep, now am I?

As a start to the new year online, I decided to try the Firefox 3.1 beta 2 and see if the “awesome bar” piece of crap “improvement” on a functional address bar would be faster. So far so good. When I begin to type something, it doesn’t hang for ten seconds after the third letter. That’s a good sign.

I got a motherboard and processor from my brother that would be a great upgrade to my old P-III. I quickly secured a cheap stick of RAM and hooked everything up. The problem is that I couldn’t seem to get anything to install on the drives. It was always coming up with errors, causing a total failure. So, I bought a replacement motherboard, thinking that I might be having problems with the IDE connectors. I really wanted to use the board my bro gave me, though, as it had better capabilities.

I had the same issues with the new board, although the operating systems that were currently on the hard drives in the machine recognized the board and booted. I still received compression errors and files weren’t saving properly. Even after installing brand new IDE cables (the pretty round ones that glow under UV light), I still had these issues.

Programs that are memory intensive, like Firefox (yes, it is, all you naysayers – its the browser that I use, and likely a lot longer than you have, but its still got leaks), would crash for no apparent reason. Many games would just refuse to load. I began to suspect something else (which I should have checked before spending money).

It turns out that the cheap used memory module was priced so low for a reason. Its crap (to quote Fab from Linux Outlaws). A quick memory test with memtest86 indicated that there were errors on 5 of the tests in the thousands. Its a guarantee that I will have better luck with a good memory stick.

So, remember, if you’re getting I/O errors, check your memory first, as its pretty much the cheapest fix, and a likely suspect.