4 ms·

I'd really like to see distributed comments across self-hosted sites and blogs, but I haven't come across a decent way to prevent spam. I used to embed Disqus

I'd really like to see distributed comments across self-hosted sites and blogs, but I haven't come across a decent way to prevent spam. I used to embed Disqus in my site, but wasn't really happy with its centralised nature (plus it was far slower and bloated than anything else I had; generally a few KB of static HTML with "motherfucking-website" aesthetics).

frio 8y ago
I imagine that the answer to that may well end up being the same as it is for email. When a comment arrives, check a few centralised reputation systems (like DNSBL), and then perform a statistical analysis of the comment against some corpus (like SpamAssassin et all) before allowing it or not. We could even introduce greylisting too.
- KajMagnus 8y ago
  DNSBL — I'm wondering those solutions are never going to work totally well? When even Facebook gets rather many spammers, don't they. It'll be a tech race and the clever spammers can continue spamming? I'm thinking the only? way to deal with clever spammers, that's really going to work, is to manually review the first N comments by each new commenter, and only approve the comments, if they add value to the blog post. Once someone has been able to add value to the blog post 3? 5? times (e.g. provided more useful info or thoughts, or asked on-topic questions whose answers = good for others to know too) — then the likelihood that that person is a spammer is maybe 0.01%, ok to auto approve his/her comments hereafter. I actually built such blog commenting software, link in my profile.
  - paulryanrogers 8y ago
    That still requires a centralized reputation system to be the clearing house. Unless people frequently comment on the same blogs. And in that case the activity would be more centralized again.
- stevekemp 8y ago
  I setup a service to do just that: https://blogspam.net/ https://blogspam.net/
KajMagnus 8y ago
Does that mean you didn't find Disqus to be spammy? Maybe varies from blog to blog? I've seen blogs with maybe 20 Disqus spam comments and 2 real comments, ... I flagged the spammy ones (which were like: "Love this blog post, it helped me so much. Btw here's my site: ..." — i.e. copy-paste generic Thanks + a spam link), nothing happened (Disqus didn't delete them). And the spammers have many accounts and have upvoted their comments, so spam comments were the topmost ones.
- chriswarbo 8y ago
  I didn't see any spam on disqus; but I only received a few comments here and there anyway. Otherwise I'd have more qualms removing it.
harlanji 8y ago
I've been messing with RSS again... almost a decade ago I implemented activitystrea.ms while it was still RSS based (now JSON) (still on my GitHub). I like the idea of clients subscribing to feeds, and syndicating comments with parent URIs, into an aggregated view; and there being discovery services, all convention, like XMPP. This is all very 1998 like LiveJournal.
chipotle_coyote 8y ago
So far, using webmentions hasn't created spam on my micro.blog instance or WordPress instance. I'm sure to a degree that's because spammers haven't found webmention yet, but it's worth noting. https://indieweb.org/Webmention https://indieweb.org/Webmention (I also find it fascinating but a little concerning that the "IndieWeb" movement and the community around ActivityPub seem to be inventing very similar wheels, either without being aware of one another's work or without much apparent interest in working together.)
- paulryanrogers 8y ago
  Reminds me of pingbacks
- chriswarbo 8y ago
  I've been keeping an eye on indieweb stuff; but held off from dynamic things like webmention for now. I agree that the divergent efforts are a little frustrating. A few years ago I had a go at implementing Salmon/MagicEnvelopes/etc. that seem like the precursor to ActivityPub. Many years ago I played around with XMPP pubsub. Hopefully W3C validation will go some way towards actual adoption this time?
kaushalmodi 8y ago
Have to looked into Webmentions? I use those my blog, with backfeed from Twitter. So I end up with few pleasant surprise Webmentions too :) So far I haven't yet (hope that didn't change) needed to do any manual spam cleanup. If I ever need to, I hope that it's as simple as deleting such mentions from WebMention.io.

frio 8y ago

I imagine that the answer to that may well end up being the same as it is for email. When a comment arrives, check a few centralised reputation systems (like DNSBL), and then perform a statistical analysis of the comment against some corpus (like SpamAssassin et all) before allowing it or not. We could even introduce greylisting too.

KajMagnus 8y ago
DNSBL — I'm wondering those solutions are never going to work totally well? When even Facebook gets rather many spammers, don't they. It'll be a tech race and the clever spammers can continue spamming? I'm thinking the only? way to deal with clever spammers, that's really going to work, is to manually review the first N comments by each new commenter, and only approve the comments, if they add value to the blog post. Once someone has been able to add value to the blog post 3? 5? times (e.g. provided more useful info or thoughts, or asked on-topic questions whose answers = good for others to know too) — then the likelihood that that person is a spammer is maybe 0.01%, ok to auto approve his/her comments hereafter. I actually built such blog commenting software, link in my profile.
- paulryanrogers 8y ago
  That still requires a centralized reputation system to be the clearing house. Unless people frequently comment on the same blogs. And in that case the activity would be more centralized again.
stevekemp 8y ago
I setup a service to do just that: https://blogspam.net/ https://blogspam.net/

KajMagnus 8y ago

Does that mean you didn't find Disqus to be spammy? Maybe varies from blog to blog? I've seen blogs with maybe 20 Disqus spam comments and 2 real comments, ... I flagged the spammy ones (which were like: "Love this blog post, it helped me so much. Btw here's my site: ..." — i.e. copy-paste generic Thanks + a spam link), nothing happened (Disqus didn't delete them). And the spammers have many accounts and have upvoted their comments, so spam comments were the topmost ones.

chriswarbo 8y ago
I didn't see any spam on disqus; but I only received a few comments here and there anyway. Otherwise I'd have more qualms removing it.

harlanji 8y ago

I've been messing with RSS again... almost a decade ago I implemented activitystrea.ms while it was still RSS based (now JSON) (still on my GitHub). I like the idea of clients subscribing to feeds, and syndicating comments with parent URIs, into an aggregated view; and there being discovery services, all convention, like XMPP. This is all very 1998 like LiveJournal.

chipotle_coyote 8y ago

So far, using webmentions hasn't created spam on my micro.blog instance or WordPress instance. I'm sure to a degree that's because spammers haven't found webmention yet, but it's worth noting. https://indieweb.org/Webmention https://indieweb.org/Webmention (I also find it fascinating but a little concerning that the "IndieWeb" movement and the community around ActivityPub seem to be inventing very similar wheels, either without being aware of one another's work or without much apparent interest in working together.)

paulryanrogers 8y ago
Reminds me of pingbacks
chriswarbo 8y ago
I've been keeping an eye on indieweb stuff; but held off from dynamic things like webmention for now. I agree that the divergent efforts are a little frustrating. A few years ago I had a go at implementing Salmon/MagicEnvelopes/etc. that seem like the precursor to ActivityPub. Many years ago I played around with XMPP pubsub. Hopefully W3C validation will go some way towards actual adoption this time?

kaushalmodi 8y ago

Have to looked into Webmentions? I use those my blog, with backfeed from Twitter. So I end up with few pleasant surprise Webmentions too :) So far I haven't yet (hope that didn't change) needed to do any manual spam cleanup. If I ever need to, I hope that it's as simple as deleting such mentions from WebMention.io.