{"id":26579,"date":"2015-04-26T14:08:03","date_gmt":"2015-04-26T19:08:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=26579"},"modified":"2015-04-26T14:08:03","modified_gmt":"2015-04-26T19:08:03","slug":"moderation-is-broken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=26579","title":{"rendered":"Moderation is Broken"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m getting a lot of complaints about this, so let me just acknowledge it publicly: The anti-spam plug-ins on this site are hosed<\/em>. At least, one of them is. About a week ago, the system went crazy and began marking 1\/3 of all valid comments as possible spam, meaning I have to manually approve them before they appear. This is time-consuming for me and really annoying for people trying to have a conversation and I’m not sure what to do about it.<\/p>\n

The frustrating thing is that it’s not catching more spam, it’s just flagging more valid comments. It still lets a bunch of flagrantly obvious spam through. Like this one:<\/p>\n

Please let me know if you're looking for a author for your weblog.
\nYou have some really good articles and I believe I would be a good asset.
\nIf you ever want to take some of the load off, I'd absolutely
\nlove to write some content for your blog in exchange for a link back to mine.<\/p>\n

Please shoot me an email if interested. Regards!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    \n
  1. I’m pretty sure this text has appeared before, and been flagged as spam before.\n
  2. The URL is packed with spam words.\n
  3. The comment has tons of stupid line breaks in the middle of sentences, which humans NEVER doOn my blog<\/span> and spammers do very often.\n
  4. The name isn’t in English.\n
  5. This is a first-time comment from this “visitor”.\n
  6. It’s commenting on a post from April 3rd.\n<\/ol>\n

    But WordPress thought this comment was just fine and let it through. Then it turned around and flagged dozen and dozens of comments from:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. People with no URL in their name or in the text of their comment. (Which means they can’t be spammers, since there’s no payload.)\n
    2. People with properly formatted comments.\n
    3. Comments where everything is clearly in English and contains no common spam words like “pills” or “SEO” or other bullshit.\n
    4. Comments from people who have thousands(!!!) of approved (by me) comments on this site.\n
    5. Comments on stuff from two days ago, which spammers can never manage.\n<\/ol>\n

      This is some 1998 level spam filtering. I can’t believe it’s this bad. I can’t believe it worked a month ago and somehow all went sideways overnight.<\/p>\n

      I’m using a lot of spam filters. With NO filters, I’d get a dozen spam a minute and the blog would be crushed in an avalanche of nonsense. I’ve got a lot of spam filters in place to hold off the worst of it, and its clear that one of my filters has gone Airport Security on us and begun freaking out over trivialities. There aren’t any quick, obvious answers, so I’m going to need a big block of time to sort it out properly. <\/p>\n

      I’ll fix it when I get the time, but I’m currently re-installing Windows* and restoring files from backup so I can get back to work after I replaced a sketchy hard drive<\/a> a few days ago. <\/p>\n

      * The actual Windows installation is quick. It’s the “everything else” that takes bloody days. Programming, source control, image editing, local WAMP server, disabling the annoying shit in Windows, audio editing, Steam, text editing, FTP, MP3 player, and a dozen other little programs and adjustments and tweaks. It actually takes a few days to get my computer back up to speed after a Windows re-install. <\/p>\n

      So I ask for patience. I know having so many comments put into moderation is maximally annoying. I’ll get to this as soon as I can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      I’m getting a lot of complaints about this, so let me just acknowledge it publicly: The anti-spam plug-ins on this site are hosed. At least, one of them is. About a week ago, the system went crazy and began marking 1\/3 of all valid comments as possible spam, meaning I have to manually approve them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26579\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}