Sorry if you got caught in the spam filter

Enochrewt

#1 – 9:04 AM September 29, 2009

I'm just glad your spam filter is more aggressive, the BB enclave seemed more prone to the next generation of spam bots than other places I've seen.

Rob Beschizza

#2 – 10:02 AM September 29, 2009

Yep, the next gen turned up. It seems to work by using some kind of techmeme-like script that scrapes comments from other blogs to put before the spam link, making the posting seem relevant.

rak0ribz

#3 – 11:14 AM September 29, 2009

Wow - that's pretty impressive.
The most recent spambots were good enough that I thought they might be actually paying people to post their links.

Rob Beschizza

#4 – 12:38 PM September 29, 2009

A part of me still hopes that they are humans.

That there are so many blogs writing about the same things, that a machine can interpolate the comment threads between them as an exercise in obscuring spam, is pretty funny.

certron

#5 – 2:20 PM September 29, 2009

How do we report spammy comments or users? There seems to be no dedicated place or facility for it as there is on the mother-blog. For a start, there are at least 2 users in the comments who are very spammy on this post: http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/06/15/randy-sarafans-simpl.html

I was only tipped off to this because one of the comments showed up in the 'recent comments' sidebar (which seems to show only posts from the current article unless on the main page, but I digress).

I did, however, notice that there is now a place to input an avatar. I look forward to using this and other new features of the site (or I'll be lazy and never upload an avatar, I haven't decided yet).

Rob Beschizza

#6 – 7:37 PM September 29, 2009

We're going to be restoring the "flag this" icon shortly, that'll be the spot.

Anonymous Anonymous

#7 – 12:01 AM September 30, 2009

It's a shame my poignant and relevant anonymous post to the net metering conversation was lost, yet my overreactionary and ill-thought-out comment about your Mercedes ad was published instead... I really do enjoy commenting anonymously, I don't feel like building up a persona and reputation for every blog I post to, despite browsing BB daily for over 5 years now.

Anyways, digression aside, we really do need a "report post" button, very badly. Far too often I've seen spam go days in the comments before being deleted, and often I've commented anonymously about spam in the thread and my comments have been published long before the spam has been noticed or deleted (making me wonder how thorughly these comments are reviewed in the first place...)

You guys do a good job regardless, and with the seemingly skeleton crew running BBG these days I really applaud how much effort must go into maintaining this section of the site.

BBG RSS Feed broken

#8 – 1:46 AM September 30, 2009

Can't see any contact details so maybe someone will see this. The BBG RSS feed appears to be broken. The most recent item is the article about Mercedes E class interiors. (Yes I have tried telling my RSS reader to re-load the feed, I've even tried subscribing to it again.)

Rob Beschizza

#9 – 10:14 AM September 30, 2009

Sorry about that, anon. I think that published comment actually got the chop thanks to the "overreactionary" language in it :) We're sympathetic to the underlying concerns, though, FYI, and BBG won't be flying that close to the sun again.

The spam situation is pretty bad right now, I know. I kill em when I see em. The mods are busy as hell fighting it on the front door, and the old notification system has, conversely, become a spam vector -- spammers use it to send spam to them!

We have a new one being tested, and it seems to work great.

It's just me and a bit of Lisa right now here -- thanks for the thoughts!

Anonymous Anonymous

#10 – 11:32 AM September 30, 2009

Rob - if you want to shoot some spammers in a barrel, check out these usernames -

kaka
blog85488
blog85493
Nannes2

:)

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