Weblog comments (was: Re: New Free Software related books for friends)

[MJ Ray]

Matthias Kirschner wrote:
> Thank you all for you comments until now. I have not yet understood what
> the big disadvantage of the current system is, and what the advantages
> of the others are. Until than I think I will stay with the current
> solution, although sometimes it might take a few hours until I can
> approve a comment on my weblog.

Do you understand what Spam Karma 2 does?

This big disadvantages (plural!) of Spam Karma 2 are:

 1. the captcha discriminates against users with disabilities, which
is only sometimes illegal but always unfair;

 2. the basic tests of "spamminess" easily cause a false positive because
comments score spam points:
  - for giving an comment author URL;
  - for giving any other URLs;
  - for refusing to execute javascript;
  - for typing things that look a bit like HTML;
  - for submitting a comment too quickly after loading the page (which
you might do if someone posted the entire blog entry to a list and it
was a short comment);
  and other non-spam heuristics.

 3. the RBL plugin still defaults to looking up against blbl.org -
which closed in 2006
http://jamesoff.net/site/2006/09/26/ive-had-enough/ - and the
opm.blitzed.org service - which I think isn't free software.

The advantages of other methods are that they are:

 1. open to all;

 2. tests the comment for actually being spam;

 3. 100% free software.

Hope that explains,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)  Webmaster and LMS developer at     | software
www.software.coop http://mjr.towers.org.uk        |  .... co
IMO only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html |  .... op