Comment spam outpacing e-mail spam

This week my comment spam has outpaced my e-mail spam. The comment spammers use varied IP addresses, so an IP block does no good. MT-Blacklist is not working for me at the moment but hopefully I will have it installed when the final bits ship with Movable Type 3.1 next week. MT-Blacklist blocks comments based on keywords and link usage, not just IP block. How bad is the problem? Only 7.7% of the comments submitted to my site are legitimate comments. I could restrict to only TypeKey comments, but even a Six Apart employee does not use TypeKey when leaving a comment on my weblog. I do not want anyone to have to jump through too many hoops to participate in a conversation. My solution is to wait on the new MT-Blacklist. I approve all comments before they appear live on my weblog, so it is just a pain to remove the comments and delete the notification e-mails I receive for junk e-mail. I am sure Jay will make good money from licensing MT-Blacklist. The comment blocking feature is too important for Six Apart to leave to an outside developer. Ultimately Six Apart needs to acquire Jay or roll their own solution. Six Apart’s immediate response will be “use TypeKey,” which could work well for a restricted audience, but not a broader audience. The ability to comment on a published item is an essential element for a weblog platform. Many publishers are now shutting down their comments because they just cannot handle the signal to noise ratio. User experience is key, and comment spam takes as much away from the user experience as an e-mail box full of spam. [Update: I went through my log files to look for the path taken by the spammer. The worst spammer was a POST direct to mt-comments.cgi from agent “MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 4.0; PCUser,” or Internet Explorer 6 on a NT box. Each comment spam follows a pattern yet has a unique identifier. E-mail address is “bob@y” + identifier + “o.com” and the identifier begins the comment text. The linked site contains no links and the spammer must only be interested in PageRank for a future launched site. The best course of action is to change the name of mt-comments.cgi to something different and update mt.cfg. This change will make upgrading a little more difficult, but it is worth the pain to keep the bulk of comment spam away (for now).]

Share your feed unsubscribes idea

I add and delete RSS and Atom feeds from my news aggregators every week. I publish my OPML file on occasion and services such as Dave Winer’s Share Your OPML index the file. Anyone could run a diff of the OPML and modified date and track my subscribes and unsubscribes. What’s lost in the data is why I unsubscribed. I think this unsubscribe data would be valuable to publishers, especially as syndication becomes more corporate. Maybe someone unsubscribes to my feed because they do not like my posts about soccer. I could create a feed that includes or excludes certain categories, or I might already have that capability and the user is not aware of the variety of feeds. A user might dislike a feed with only titles and unsubscribe from the feed. All ideas that could motivate a publisher to change their offerings. I imagine a business (Bloglines, Feedster) could charge owners of a feed for information regarding why a user unsubscribed. User retention spending already exists in the publishing world, and the service would be an easy sell to companies tracking online subscriptions. The first step is centralized sharing of subscription lists. Bloglines and Feedster already allow OPML imports. The second step is allowing tool vendors to pass a change to your servers using XML-RPC or other formats. An aggregator user could choose to share his or her complete list as well as the deletes if they opt-in. Of course the company would offer consulting services to help feed publishers create best practices and grow their subscriptions. Such a service would be the Nielsen ratings of the online syndication world.

Alcohol Without Liquid

Alcohol Without Liquid (AWOL) is a new machine that allows bar patrons to inhale liquor in a mist instead of drinking it. It takes about 20 minutes to inhale one vaporizer shot of alcohol. Most locations charge $10 plus the cost of a shot. It looks like an inverted bong.

The user chooses which alcoholic spirit will be used and the alcoholic spirit is loaded into a diffuser capsule in the machine. The oxygen bubbles are then passed through the capsule, absorbing the alcohol, before being inhaled through a tube. The resultant cloudy alcohol vapor is then inhaled from the end of the tube via a device that converts liquid to vapor.

New York Times on classroom weblogs

Jeffrey Salingo of the New York Times writes about weblogs in the classroom in today’s issue.

For teachers, blogs are attractive because they require little effort to maintain, unlike more elaborate classroom Web sites, which were once heralded as a boon for teaching. Helped by templates found at sites like tblog.com and movabletype.org, teachers can build a blog or start a new topic in an existing blog by simply typing text into a box and clicking a button.

Parents are also able to follow along and they can see what is happening in their child’s classroom, and encourage the child to post a question at night while it is fresh in their minds. Very cool.

MTIfNonZero: Undocumented Movable Type template tag

Movable Type 3.0 introduced the MTIfNonZero template tag. If you would like to take action in your template only if a tag has a non-zero entry, use MTIfNonZero for valid XHTML. Example: <MTIfNonZero tag="MTEntryCommentCount"> <ol> <MTComments> <li><MTCommentAuthorIdentity> wrote something.</li> </MTComments> </ol> </MTIfNonZero> MTIfNonZero tag is currently not listed in the Movable Type template tag documentation but should be and it works.