Preview required?
This is a trial balloon. What I am trying to explore is what would happen if I were to convert the act of posting a comment into request/response interaction. I would very much like to do this in a way that does not significantly inhibit the sponteneity that an comment system which does not require prior registration allows.
I also have a number of ideas relating to the insertion of tailored warnings on the preview page for conditions that can be easily detected. These conditions could include: as postings to older blog entries, posts that are nearing the point of throttling, and the providing of URLs to pages which do not appear to be weblogs (missing autodiscovery tags or the like).
Such warnings could simply be informational - posts that violate these conditions could still be allowed. However, I am considering have one or more of these conditions trigger some action (perhaps as simple as adding a checkbox) that would require some additional interaction on the user's part. Such additions could even be variable or random. Probing or otherwise getting this interaction wrong could also be factored into the throttling algorithm.
However, there is now a submit button next to the preview button, before I have previewed. Is this intended behavior? I am going to submit without previewing.
Posted by Jason Clark at
Seems to work pretty well. I didn't get any kind of a warning at all. I guess Sam has figured out how to write a script that detects my fundamental honesty. :)
Posted by Craig Andera at
I've seen this employed elsewhere.
I'm considering doing the same in the hopes of thwarting any cretin using WWW::Mechanize for evil instead of for good.
Posted by Mean Dean atHmmm...
I had considered the "what text is in this bitmap" trick to avoid this problem - looks like you're on a similar path.
I wonder how your scheme would translate to a wire protocol to decouple commenters from the browser?
DB
Posted by Don Box atThe preview works fines...no problem. I would think however, that trying to block comments that provide "URLs to pages which do not appear to be weblogs (missing autodiscovery tags or the like)" would be fraught with peril. This sounds like something another Mark warns about.
Posted by Mark Mascolino at
Preview prototyped
OK, an initial implementation of my preview required functionality is complete. Other than requiring a preview, most of you should not see any different behavior. I've also relaxed my spam throttle to allow three comments - this allows the first to g... [more]Trackback from Sam Ruby at
Contrary to popular belief, the user agent for most of the comment spams is "IE". I do not believe this to be a spoof - too many other corroborating factors are often present. I can often track an initial referral from a google query with some combination of the words "weblog" and "query", followed by a fetch of favicon.txt, comment_form.js, blog.css and other paraphernalia.
My initial implementation only provides warnings about blacklists and throttles. I do not plan to put up one of those "can you read this bitmap" things, my plans are to be considerably less obtrusive, and any additional checks will not be applied indiscriminately, but only to those for those posts for which there appears to be reasonable cause for suspicion.
My guess is that wire protocols (SOAP, REST), will soon require full authentication. I've got some prototypes planned for that too, and I will provide more details as I get further along.
Posted by Sam Ruby atIs it to prevent spam, or to make people think about what they post?
I think the latter is a better reason to do it!
Then again, I've always been careful about what I write, considering most blogs you can't edit your comments.
Posted by Tim Marman atSpam Update
Based on the lively discussions of the past few days, it certainly appears that requiring a preview does not impede the flow of discussion. Cool. Spam also is way down, despite my having removed and relaxed a number of other defenses. Notably, my spa... [more]Trackback from Sam Ruby at
Preview prototyped
Nice. OK, an initial implementation of my preview required functionality is complete. Other than requiring a preview, most of you should not see any different behavior. I've also relaxed my spam throttle to allow three comments - this allows the...Excerpt from deeje @ BloggerJack at
Alternatives and Comment Previews
With the recent announcement of the Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition, the blog world is buzzing with all kinds of recommendations for switching away from MT. I'm not sure whether this site will remain on MT 2.661, upgrade to the......Excerpt from Full Speed at
Think Before You Speak
Sam Ruby is conducting a test to see how people feel about being required to preview their blog comments prior to posting them. Since Sam's test system seems to be only allowing preview, and not post, I'll comment here....... [more]Trackback from jclark.org/weblog at