Comments and trackbacks yet again

I did something this morning that I’ve rarely had to do: Deleted a comment that had made it past Spam Karma 2.

I didn’t tag it as spam, because it wasn’t clearly spam. But I did consider it offtopic and mildly offensive, an all-lower-case rant. It wasn’t a case of disagreeing with me; it was a case of being disagreeable.

I maintain open commenting, which is becoming rarer (I think). I intend to feel free to delete comments that I regard as inappropriate.

As for trackbacks, those were originally allowed but didn’t appear; now they’re explicitly disallowed, as a second line of defense for the thousands (literally) of spam trackback attempts. (Spam Karma’s number at the foot of the page is real, unfortunately.)

I seem to have a new problem (is this a “lazyweb” call for help? dunno): I’m no longer getting email when a comment appears. Since I’m not likely to check W.a.r. more than once a day or so (and a whole lot less than once a day if I’m offline, e.g. during ALA or vacations), that may mean that comments don’t get read and responded to (or deleted, as necessary) for a while. I do read every comment, when I see them. I’d love to know how to get the mail notification to work again…I’m guessing it’s some interaction between Spam Karma and WP’s discussion settings.

That’s it: No big deal. (Oh, as for the informal ALA New Orleans post: It appears that the post to LITA-L never made it, for reasons unknown. If someone else wants to copy that text, or just the airport-related portion, to LITA-L or any other list, be my guest; just say “Walt Crawford sez” or something of the sort. Jessamyn’s comment indicates that not-wildly-unreasonably-priced tickets are still available from some cities for some dates, but that may not last long.)

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This work by Walt Crawford is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 1st, 2006 at 11:35 am and is filed under ALA, Writing and blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Comments and trackbacks yet again”

  1. Blake says:
    June 6, 2006 at 6:35 am

    There’s some new mod_security rules that should help as well. Try typing common drugs into the comment field and it’ll kill them before they get anywhere. I’ll be adding more as I find them.

  2. walt says:
    June 10, 2006 at 11:45 am

    Blake, just for your info: Fixing my user profile worked. I’m now getting Gmail notification of comments.

    Whew. 5823 Spams. Admittedly, Spam Karma catches loads of stuff that WP would stop anyway (and most of those Spams these days are trackbacks, which I don’t allow as a matter of policy), but for a tiny little blog like this, that’s a whole load of spam.