Tag: trackback

Where did the discussion move to?

The oldest post you’ll find on this blog is from nearly sixteen years ago, although it’s technically a “recovered” post that came from a very old Blogspot account I used when I was in high school. The actual blog that people started following is probably fourteen years old, when Planet Gentoo started and I started writing about my development there. While this is nowhere as impressive as Scalzi’s, it’s still quite an achievement in 2020, when a lot of people appear to have moved to Medium posts or Twitter threads.

Sixteen years are an eternity in Internet terms, and that means the blog has gone through a number of different trends, from the silly quizzes to the first copy-and-paste list memes, from trackbacks to the anti-spam fights. But the one trend that has been steady over the past six years (or so) is the mistreatment of comments. I guess this went together with the whole trend of toxic comments increasing, and the (not wrong) adage of “don’t read the comments”, but it’s something that saddened me before, and that saddens me today.

First of all, the lack of comments feels, to me, like a lack of engagement. While I don’t quite write with the intention of pleasing others, I used to have meaningful conversations with readers of the blog in the past — whether it was about correcting my misunderstanding of things I have no experience with, or asking follow up questions that could become more blog posts for other to find.

Right now, while I know there’s a few readers of the blog out there, it feels very impersonal. A few people might reply to the Tweet that linked to the new post, and maybe one or two might leave a comment on LinkedIn, but that’s usually where the engagement ends for me, most of the time. Exception happen, including my more recent post on zero-waste, but even those are few and far between nowadays. And not completely unexpectedly, I don’t think anyone is paying attention to the blog’s Facebook page.

It’s not just the big social media aggregators, such as Reddit and Hacker News, that cause me these annoyances. Websites like Boing Boing, which Wikipedia still calls a “group blog”, or Bored Panda, and all their ilks, appear to mostly be gathering posts from other people and “resharing” them, nowadays. On the bright side of the spectrum, some of these sites at least appear to add their own commentary on the original content, but in many other cases I have seen them reposting the “eye catchy” part of the original content (photo, diagram, infographic, video) without the detailed explanations, and sometimes making it hard to even find the original credit.

You can imagine that it is not a complete coincidence that I’m complaining about this after having had to write a full-on commentary due to Boing Boing using extremely alarmist tones around a piece of news that, in my view, barely should have been notable. Somehow it seems news around diabetes and glucometers have this effect on people — you may remember I was already annoyed when Hackaday was tipped about my project, and decided to bundle it with an (unsafe!) do-it-yourself glucometer project that got the most of the comments on their own post.

I guess this ends up sounding a lot like an old man shouting at clouds — but I also still think that discussing ideas, posts, opinions with the creators are worth doing, particularly if the creators have the open mind of listening to critique of their mistakes — and, most importantly, the “capacitance” to send abuse away quickly. Because yeah, comments became toxic a long time ago, and I can’t blame those who prefer not to even bother with comments in the first place, despite disliking it myself.

To conclude, if you have anything to discuss or suggest me, please do get in touch. It’s actually a good feeling to know that people care.

Changes in the comment antispam

You probably remember the series of posts I already wrote about my antispam that uses the User-agent field to reject at the source a number of comments that are likely to be spam. The idea is definitely working right, just yesterday it filtered out 134 spam comments (no false positives, after a quick check), and at the same time I have no need to use obnoxious captchas, or to block comments on old posts (and just yesterday I got an interesting one on an almost year old post ).

Unfortunately this was still not perfect; luckily there is a second antispam pass that is applied directly by Typo using some heuristics (like the number of links) and akismet; this second pass is both good and bad. For instance it always marks as spam the posts where people do provide references for their comment, which is a bit tiresome. Sure it does not delete the posts, but only queue them up for moderation, but still. Unfortunately the second pass couldn’t be disabled or loosened up because usually I would get around three spam comments every day or so (which is still a lot less compared to the hundreds sometimes the filter kills at the source).

But last night, thanks to Mark, I was able to refine the antispam even more (and the comment policy now is updated to reflect that); I added a couple more DNSBL (DNS-based blacklists): proxyBL DroneBL and CBL . I left them running on the untested input during the night and the results are quite interesting. Just one or two hits on ProxyBL, but about two posts an hour hit DroneBL right away, and of those a few wouldn’t have hit my usual User-Agent-only antispam.

But since I don’t want to hit other services when I can filter the spam myself, I’ve now re-configured the checks to only apply if the comment didn’t hit any other check first (this way all the bogus user agent posts would be dropped and then the remaining “valid” ones would be checked). In particular, CBL is set as the very last check, for a very important reason: CBL does not sanction its use for non-mail related filtering. Unfortunately, CBL is also the only list that had a couple of IP addresses from which false negatives arrived yesterday, so I really wouldn’t have wanted to ignore it entirely. But I am responsible for any problem related to CBL with this kind of use; please don’t ever bother CBL upstream about this.

And another change, related to the blog spam, might be of interest. I’ve tried re-enabling the trackback support, but as it was easy to guess, there seems to be nothing but spam passing through it nowadays; very few valid installations actually use the trackback support, and they definitely don’t justify the amount of spam I’d be getting; on the other hand, Typo should be able to trackback itself to link posts together when I note something about them, and that’s one thing that I’d really like to keep; so for now I’ve enabled the trackback feature from within Typo, but I’ve stopped it on the Apache configuration, by allowing only the server’s own IP address to access the location.

I’ll publish the modsecurity configuration someday in the near future, hopefully.