The spam filter has a lot of work to do
Just a little inside baseball—I thought you might be curious to know how much spam the filter on a blog like this must block. There’s some variation, but depending on the day the number of spam comments that get caught in that filter in a 24-hour period is usually between 5,000 and 10,000.
Many of them are from the same groups, over and over again. It’s very rare for a spam comment to not get trapped in that filter, and for that I’m very grateful, because you can see how spam could easily overwhelm a blog. The number of spam comments here have increased tremendously over time; I think when I started out it was just a few hundred a day, although I can’t say I remember.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_eYSuPKP3Y
The number shouldn’t astonish me but it does. It seems to me though to be a kind of badge of honor, that so many on the left should seek to disrupt this blog?
Geoffrey Britain:
It’s not the left. It’s just spam. Mostly advertising other websites and products. Some of the spam pretends to be actual readers, but some doesn’t even bother with that. It’s automatically generated, I believe.
Neo – Yes. The worry re: the left (and other “pranksters”), are hacking, denial of service attacks, etc.
Was curious though… why not Disqus for comments?
Price of popularity, Neo.
Please please please not Dreadful Disqus!
In the first place, if you want to comment you have to register with them (although you can do so with your Google or Facebook or other nitwit account if it makes you feel better), and they say up front that you’re agreeing to allow their “marketing partners” (I forget what the exact phrase is) to send you all that junk mail that will overflow your Inbox and drive you to drink.
Even worse, people who take their weblogs to D.D. always end up losing all the comments that had built up on their sites over the course of years, and the better sites (like this one!) have reams of good comments that contain substantive information.
Second, D.D. has that horrible “threading.” WP is much, much better. If you want to reply to a specific comment, that’s easy — just refer to the time-and-date stamp. And you can see easily, at a glance, what comments have been added since you last looked.
The only threading that I’ve ever seen that was any good was the kind that Yahoo Groups abandoned in it’s devolution of a year or two ago. There, the postings and comments were presented in-line (just as in a WordPress system), but there was also an outline of a given discussion at the bottom of the page, with just the first line or two presented. You could then click through on messages pertinent to that discussion, from the outline.
Threading also tends to make people overlook comments that they might find very interesting but that are in a different thread of the discussion from the one they’re presently absorbed in. This lowers the actual value of the comments overall, although I suppose a lot of people don’t perceive the difference.
So, No No Neo, please don’t ever change!
“its devolution,” of course. Apostrophe typo. And although I was in Preview, for some reason the machine decided I was through proofreading and submitted the comment.
Gremlins.
” If you want to reply to a specific comment, that’s easy – just refer to the time-and-date stamp” – Julie.
That is not “threading”, that is referencing. And that is no replacement for threading.
Threading is a KEY feature that allows one to easily follow a line of discussion.
As for the “downside” of overlooking comments in Disqus, when the comments section in WP gets too long, especially with lack of threading, most probably won’t bother reading through all comments. Maybe that is only me, but I doubt so.
As for “registering”, man, you have to use an email address here anyway. Not much difference, except you must enter it every time here vs log in to Disqus.
Losing past comments is a problem. Don’t know if WP has a work around for that.
Anyway, this is not an article about comment tools, so will refrain from further discussion on the topic.
Big Maq:
I find that Disqus often doesn’t load properly; it’s very annoying, IMHO.
Also, do you really have to type in your email address here every time? The computers I’ve used only make you do it once, and then they remember. I’m not sure what settings make that happen or don’t make it happen, but that’s been my experience.
Also, I detest threading when I’m reading a comment stream. That’s because I might check it at one point, and then check it again hours later to see what’s new, and with threading I can’t separate the old comments from the new
Neo: Regarding comments presented in chronological order vs. “threaded” comments: Exactly.
There’s another difficulty with “threading,” which is the fact that often one wishes to make a comment which is really a response to more than one preceding comment, so that it could reasonably be posted as a reply to any of them. How to choose where to put the response?
And how does the commenter arrange to capture the attention of different people following these different comments?
I love the WP system. And I love the fact that I can address more than one comment, or more than one issue, in a single box if I choose.
. . .
Also, with one exception the WP-supported sites where I’ve left comments (including this one) do indeed fill in the e-mail and user-name boxes. I’m pretty sure that this is because WP leaves cookies on the user’s machine that include that info.
As for needing to give your e-mail address on WP sites just as on Disqus-supported sites:
WordPress doesn’t use your e-mail address for any marketing purposes whatsoever, nor for tracking either, that I’ve ever heard of. Whereas Disqus specifically warns you that they’re going to be giving their “partners,” or whatever the phrase is, your address so that the latter can send you all manner of junk mail imploring you to Buy, or to Donate, or whatever.
I refuse to comment on a Disqus site. I simply won’t do it.
The point is that some identification has to be supplied every time, be it stored in the browser cache (if security settings don’t prevent that) and automatically populated, or is a login credential stored in the browser cache.
If it is about avoiding junk mail, using an email id separate from your personal email id is all that is required.
I don’t buy the stated “downsides” as being all that much in comparison to being able to easily following the various lines of thinking / discussion. Maybe I’m unique (here), but …
http://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-adds-threading-to-conversations/?_escaped_fragment_=#!
Administrative issues do exist and I don’t know how others get around them, but that is a common complaint I’ve read from other blog owners.
That is probably the biggest hurdle in going to a service like Disqus, and I understand and respect that.
Ultimately, it is whatever Neo chooses to do, and that is fine by me.