First step
After a certain amount of research and thought, I have decided to institute the simplest possible change to the blog. I have now closed Blogger comments and installed Haloscan.
It shouldn’t be too difficult to use; I think the instructions are self-explanatory. We’ll see how this goes.
See how easy? Piece of cake.
Way to go, Neo.
Looks good!
Wow,
I can feel the IQ level shooting back up already.
Seriously, while it is a shame a step like this is necessary, I think it was worthwhile.
Neo, as always, keep up the good work.
WG
Thanks.
Excellent, ma’am. Thank you.
Just a minor point: HaloScan bans by IP address, and many internet service providers assign “dynamic” ones (meaning that they can and do change regularly). So unfortunately, there’ll be a bit of work maintaining any ban because all an unwelcome commenter needs to do is wait for or force a change to their IP address. But this should be sufficient for now.
I thank you for your work, and must say I’m very appreciative of the effort you dedicate to this blog. I imagine that it must feel thankless at times, but rest assured, the large majority of your audience appreciates what you’re doing.
Yay! I can comment again.
Watch out for the spambots, though.
Big Hummus, I believe the current release allows banning entire IP ranges. Requires a little research with determining what ISP “owns” what ranges, but it solves the dynamic IP problem. It is much more flexible than previous releases. Shame on me, I hadn’t been keeping up with it.
So, how is this different?
Well, so far so good — no obvious trolls. Which is certainly different, and reason for some satisfaction. Congrats, neo (tentatively).
There went the IQ level, alas.
That’s right little fella. Only if the commenter allows it. HaloScan comments doesn’t recognize the Blogger profile. And, you can enter a “null” web page so that the FFM’s can’t find other blogs to infest.
That’s true, Wasp, but the problem is that banning by range isn’t really efficient. A person won’t necessarily get an IP adjacent to their old one (for example 206.20.20.20, then to 206.20.20.21 or .19), and some ISP’s won’t even have adjacent subnets. So an IP can vary wildly even within the same ISP. Not to mention the fact that doing so would run the risk of cutting off other, innocent commenters.
I’ve seen some talk on some sites about more finely targeted comment filtering; it’s really developed for spam, not trolls, but it can be applied as such. Some comment engines allow for scripts to do name matching as well, and they’re squishy, so they can handle intentional misspellings, captializations, deliberate c h -an g es in sp a c ing, cAPtaLIzaTioN, and l377er/ch4r4c73r s|_|bs7iTut10n. But really, the simplest and most effective guard is registered commenters, and I don’t mean like the Blogger-membership. Some blogs only allow commenters registered to that blog specifically.
Really, though, I’d hate to put a bigger onus on Neo than what’s already there. She’s already had to do too much to deal with the incivility of others.
Big Hummus, I agree but this is a fine first effort. I know our boys and they don’t know how to expire the lease on a dynamic IP and get a new one. And, it only takes a couple of iterations to pick up the ranges an ISP is using. I have a really good basic tutorial called “Source Tracing 101” that deals specifically with excising trolls. Try Google for it. It’s too long to place here and would be of little interest anyway.
This method is fine grained enough for the nonce.
Neo,
I miss using Haloscan.. Used it when I had Blogger but it is not available in WordPress..
Works well though and is easy.
BTW — I have a blog on the star of the new “religious” democrat party.. Barak Obama, Check it out..
ExP
Ahhhh… much better. Now if I only had this feature for family gatherings.
testing testing testing
Please let me be your new and personal TROLL!
Old Trolls in New comments!
Have never used this.Ihave grown to respect your intelligence the more I have read this.
Hope this works cause the trolls were getting pretty irritating.
No, Gerard, you and I just look like trolls. You have to act like one to get filtered out.
Been sending your Lincoln’s Land Without God post all over the place. Just dropped in her to see how th troll hammer was working and to read the new post.
“I know our boys and they don’t know how to expire the lease on a dynamic IP and get a new one.”-Wasp
Heck, they didn’t even know how to use quotation marks…
Good riddance! And here’s hoping some opposition with manners will make itself known- it’s more fun that way.
Thanks, I am looking forward to satisfying my long unrequited urge to comment( instead of lurking ).
> Source Tracing 101
Wasp, got a link on that? I can’t find any matching reference.
P.S., you can bury links in HaloScrew with
[broket]a Href=”link here”[broket]TEXT to be hyperlinked[broket]/a[broket], for those who don’t know.
Broket equals the angle brackets, those two keys above the “.” & “,”
Consider yourself OWNED, trolls!
🙂
LOL at Cappy “Ahhhh… much better. Now if I only had this feature for family gatherings.”