Real Live Preacher

I'll post tomorrow

December 18, 2007 - 4:54pm

Hey everyone. Tim Miller is the new guy in charge of the technical end of things here at rlp. I'll write a little more about him tomorrow. We met by chance, but he came along just in time.

I have two pieces being considered by the Christian Century and am working on a third serious piece which will go there or here. This one is tentatively called "Let's Put the X Back in Xmas."

While I finish that, I have a number of things to tell you about tomorrow:

1. Reggie Regan saved the day on the sign. I have pics.

2. A new RLP will roll out soon. Same basic look but new Drupal and probably some new stuff. I have a hard decision to make regarding the old comments and a plague of comment spam. I want to ask you what you think I should do about that.

3. I just found out that my trip to install water purifiers in the Dominican Republic in January costs more than I thought. I'm going to humbly ask for a little help. Tell you about that tomorrow as well.

For now, I'm thankful for Tim Miller getting the site back running.

Until tomorrow...

rlp

rlp's blog

Personal Update

In regards to "comment spam"

Submitted by islandpastor on December 18, 2007 - 5:49pm.

In regards to "comment spam" there are a few things you can do. You can set up a verifyer where you have to put in a code based on what you see on the screen in order to have comments posted (this eliminates all "bots" from leaving spam on your site) or you can set it up so that no comments are posted unless they are verified by you. The second option would probably be too time consuming for you because you get so many comments on a daily basis.

I look forward to seeing the changes and the new article.

If you decide to delete all

Submitted by Keith on December 18, 2007 - 6:04pm.

If you decide to delete all the old comments, I'd like to save the ones on your CREDO post, and put them someplace where they can still be read. However, I'm unclear on rights issues. Any thoughts about that?

I've been a long time reader

Submitted by JustJames on December 18, 2007 - 7:12pm.

I've been a long time reader here. Your site going down shocked me into finally registering!

I second the notion of using a service like "captcha" that forces users to enter text from an image before their comments are posted. It's a bit of a pain, but not nearly as painful as SPAM.

Love your work.

Regards,
James

James Curtis Smith
www.JustJames.org

Yeah, the problem is, I have

Submitted by rlp on December 18, 2007 - 8:50pm.

Yeah, the problem is, I have to upgrade to the latest version of Drupal to be able to use captcha. But that still doesn't deal with the 50,000 or so (literal number) spam comments in the archives.

we're working on a solution.

hi tim here just to clarify

Submitted by administrator on December 18, 2007 - 7:20pm.

hi
tim here
just to clarify - we do have a plan going forward to manage comment spam in the future. Its the fact that there are ~50,000 comments most of which are spam now that we need to deal with.
Suggestions welcome!

When I've looked back in the

Submitted by Tom C on December 19, 2007 - 3:37am.

When I've looked back in the archive, it seems that when a story is recent and RLP has had an eye on it, the comments are ham. At some point the story falls off the radar and the comments become swamped by spam. So could you figure out a date threshold for each article, and keep comments written before that date, and remove those written afterwards? The date threshold could be

fixed relative to posting date (e.g. always a week/two weeks afterwards).
set by the first comment containing some key words (there's some obvious candidates)!

There's always the possibility of running all the comments through an existing Bayesian filter for comment spam...

Off the top of my head I'm

Submitted by iandunn on December 19, 2007 - 4:25pm.

Off the top of my head I'm not aware of an easy way to run it through an existing filter, since most would already have a program built around them. You'd need to find just a library or function that you could write a simple script around to pass all the comments through.

But, it could also be pretty easy to just run some basic queries against the db. Try to find some obvious patterns to the comments (ip, links, etc) and just delete those. It wouldn't be 100% effective, but could probably make a significant impact.

I'd be happy to help out if you guys want.

thanks. check back later

Submitted by rlp on December 19, 2007 - 4:32pm.

thanks. check back later tonight when I write more about this.

Preacher-- Please do your

Submitted by David (not verified) on December 18, 2007 - 7:22pm.

Preacher--
Please do your very best to keep the comments for this blog. I believe the comments to be in some cases as critical as your posts.
Keep up the good work!
--David

I have no technical advice,

Submitted by Chuck Warnock (not verified) on December 18, 2007 - 8:15pm.

I have no technical advice, but from a practical standpoint I would blow the comments out and move on. New legit comments will replace the old ones soon, and life will go on. But, of course, keep my comments...Chuck

I used to be slammed by spam

Submitted by Mark D. Roberts (not verified) on December 18, 2007 - 10:35pm.

I used to be slammed by spam in my comments and guestbook. Then I switched to Wordpress, which integrates with Akimset. My spam fell to about zero. Akimset catches a few things that aren't spam, but is amazingly accurate. In the last few months, Akimset has caught 1,152 pieces of comment spam. Worth the price of admission, considering that Akimset is free.

How about a piece called

Submitted by bradford (not verified) on December 19, 2007 - 9:35pm.

How about a piece called "Putting Saturn back in Christmas"?

If the problem is spam

Submitted by sravana (not verified) on December 21, 2007 - 11:00am.

If the problem is spam hitting older comment threads, could you set up your blog to close comments on every thread after two weeks or so?

we will look at an automatic

Submitted by administrator on December 21, 2007 - 5:48pm.

we will look at an automatic comment closer that going forward as part of our anti spam strategy - thanks