Comment issue
Seems a few folks’ comments are getting gobbled up by my spam filter. I try to monitor it but, frankly, I get so many spam comments per day, it’s difficult to keep up with. So, if it happens to you, it’s not personal. But let me know. One hint is stop using the word socialism. Because it contains the name of common ED drug that spammers like to spam about.
December 9th, 2016 at 2:06 pm
I haven’t noticed posts disappearing, but over the last couple of days, my e-mails of other’s posts have been showing ’ where an apostrophe is supposed to be.
I don’t know if it’s an issue with hotmail or on your end.
Any other hotmail users seeing this?
December 9th, 2016 at 2:38 pm
Substring matching is usually a bad idea – the Scunthorpe problem.
(I’d rather just have a reCaptcha system.)
December 9th, 2016 at 2:43 pm
Somehow “so-dicksohardyoucouldkillanelkwithit-m” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
December 9th, 2016 at 6:35 pm
For WordPress, take a look at the Conditional Captcha plugin. It’s pretty clever: for all comments that pass the standard Akismet checks, it doesn’t get involved at all. They get posted (or held for moderation, etc.) normally, just as they would before.
However, for things that Akismet thinks are spammy, the commenter is presented with a captcha (either a locally generated one or a recaptcha — I recommend the latter).
I have mine setup such that comments that pass Conditional Captcha are held for moderation (just in case, but you could also have them go live) while those that fail Conditional Captcha just get silently deleted (though you could hold them in the spam folder if you want to make sure you’re not losing legit messages).
It’s basically solved the spam problem for me.
December 9th, 2016 at 7:48 pm
Getting symbols like that instead of the appropriate punctuation is usually a sign that the source character encoding is mismatched with the character encoding being used by the program displaying the text.
Uncle’s blog is set to ISO-8859-1, so I’m guessing Hotmail and/or your browser is using the standard UTF-8.
December 9th, 2016 at 11:05 pm
Dude, if I can’t bitch about social-ism on the internet I might as well unplug all together.
December 10th, 2016 at 10:53 am
Test: Viagra
I had to know.
*See, I had to approve this one* – SayUncle
December 10th, 2016 at 11:50 am
Just as well, it’s communism all the way down and should not be sugarcoated. Call it what it is…
December 10th, 2016 at 1:47 pm
Well, communism is just social…. with gun control.
Conspiracy theory about the name of that ED drug. It’s a naming was a plot?
December 10th, 2016 at 2:56 pm
Robert:
I’m seeing that sort of thing with ads on Craigslist. Particularly vehicle ads that are scams that originate from outside North America. LOTS of scam ads on CL in cars&trucks.
December 10th, 2016 at 9:02 pm
Will: In those cases, either they’re copy-pasting from a text file which has a different character encoding than what Craigslist is using, or they’re introducing it deliberately in order to make the posts more searchable so that whoever they’re working for can verify their output.