{"id":698,"date":"2005-02-19T04:41:25","date_gmt":"2005-02-18T19:41:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/02\/19\/frustrated-users-and-new-developments\/"},"modified":"2005-02-21T20:50:05","modified_gmt":"2005-02-21T11:50:05","slug":"frustrated-users-and-new-developments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/02\/19\/frustrated-users-and-new-developments\/","title":{"rendered":"Frustrated Users and New Developments"},"content":{"rendered":"

This entry was originally gonna be a comment posted on Dave’s Chalkboard<\/a> in response to this post<\/a>. But then I realized it had taken the size of a novella, and furthermore, most of its content is probably relevant to other people too. So here goes another entry about Spam Karma<\/a>…
\nSorry, I know this is getting tedious, I’m tired of talking about it too… I promise this is the last time you hear about it until I finally get off my ass and release SK 2.0<\/em><\/p>\n

First of all, believe me I am the first one sorry to hear that some people are being consistently singled out by SK: it is far from a perfect tool, especially in light of recent changes brought by WP 1.5 (regarding trackbacks for example, WP code was changed in a way that runs all trackbacks through comment filters, not a great decision imho, since it has the result of breaking lots of backward compatibility with filters that were only intended to work on comments)…<\/p>\n

In your case, I suspect your IP might have ended up on some major Realtime Blacklist (RBL) servers such as Spamhaus<\/a>: these lists are stuffed with false positives and are not under my control and I actually advise people to turn that filter off unless spam really keeps coming through.
\nAnother very likely culprit is the use of a proxy server that mask (or changes) your IP. This is a definite comment killer… Since it’s the signature move of spambots trying to spoof IPs. Not using this criterion would make spam-filtering nigh impossible… I’ve been looking into ways to detect friendly proxies and force them to use the same IP and not cache the page, without success so far…
\nSetting SK on “lenient”, as somebody pointed out, is probably a good idea too…
\nIf you want to contact me directly by email and try posting a test comment on my blog, I’ll be able to tell you exactly why it’s not working (in fact, anybody could tell you, since they’ll receive your comments in their SK digest, along with detailed headers).<\/p>\n

Anyway, trust me, I’m the first one unhappy with SK’s imperfection, especially given its high rate of adoption these days: there’s nothing more frustrating than seeing bugs you don’t have time to fix, being downloaded by hundreds of people… <\/p>\n

I WILL resume development, and I believe I can bring SK much closer to a 0% false positive score, which was the initial goal (yea, we kinda drifted, somewhere along the escalating arm race, when it became so annoying to deal with spam, that I really had to crank the filters up).<\/p>\n

In response to Adam<\/a>, I am actually both<\/strong> studying and<\/strong> trying to make a living full time, which, along with attempts at preserving some kind of social life, leaves little extra time for side projects…
\nHowever, SK is absolutely open-source (MIT license) and anybody is free to take the ball and run with it (with proper credits etc, of course). As for a more coordinated effort: I have occasionally been getting help and snippets from people, but the size of SK (it’s totalling around 3000 lines of PHP right now), makes it a non-trivial coding project and requires some level of involvement. Plus its code has mutated into something rather horrible, over successive versions…
\n So I haven’t really found anybody willing to put that much effort yet.
\nThat being said, and even though I have officially pulled the brake on support and development for now, I usually make an effort to integrate any snippets, diffs or bug fixes sent to me…<\/p>\n

Regarding Referrer Karma<\/a>: I probably shouldn’t open my mouth again, but I will, and I’ll say that the potential for user frustration and overall false positive banning is much, much, less than with SK.
\nFirst of all, RK does not<\/em> ban users: worst case scenario, they are simply asked to click on a redirection link (that rids their http query of its potentially spammish referrer). And this will only happen when two important conditions are not met:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Their referrer is not on any of the default whitelist or hasn’t been whitelisted by a previous successful attempt.<\/li>\n
  2. The referrer URL is reachable, but doesn’t contain their URL.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    At the moment, the only major source of false positives is webmail servers, since it’s impossible for RK to check these. But this is why there is an extensive whitelist, and I am trying to slowly add all major email and search engines. In the meantime, once again, the worst that can happen is that people have to click on a link to see your site (and you can easily whitelist the referrer in your settings once you spot them). I might work on better auto-whitelisting in the future. For now that’s all there is.<\/p>\n

    I have also added some (fully optional) integration features to make it use SK’s IP blacklist.<\/p>\n

    Basically, the concept being to stop lying there and taking it while thinking of England…
    \nEven when spam comment do not make it to the blog, their relentless attempts eats up heaps of Bandwidth and CPU (especially, I suspect, with SK’s heavy filtering process in the middle). RK’s new version simply blocks them at the door, before any serious computing starts… and there again, does it intelligently, since users can easily unblock themselves and see your site by merely clicking a link. Check out     Referrer Karma<\/a>‘s page for the latest details on this feature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This entry was originally gonna be a comment posted on Dave’s Chalkboard in response to this post. But then I realized it had taken the size of a novella, and furthermore, most of its content is probably relevant to other people too. So here goes another entry about Spam Karma… Sorry, I know this is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","category-wordpress-tweaking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}