Let’s hope nothing nasty slips through
Bookworm on Apr 14 2008 at 2:43 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized
I’m sure it’s irritating for you to post a comment that is perfectly innocuous, only to have it held in the moderation queue. This apparently occurs because Askimet has a list of words it looks for that are commonly associated with spam. The problem is that Askimet doesn’t distinguish too well between words. Take, for example, the word “blowjob,” which is one of the words Askimet includes in its list of words that will cause a comments to be held for moderation. I don’t have a problem, of course, with requiring that I moderate comments with the word “blowjob,” since that word probably has no place on this blog. Unfortunately, the way Askimet works, it will also hold all comments with the word “job.” I’ve therefore removed from the Askimet list all words that, like “blowjob,” contain within them perfectly ordinary words that shouldn’t be subjecting you to moderation. We’ll see if I’ve opened myself up to the horrors of obscene and irritating spam, or not. If a little spam trickles through, I can live with it. If a lot does, we’re going right back to Askimet’s pre-programmed hypersensitivity.
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5 Responses to “Let’s hope nothing nasty slips through”
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I once knew a guy who has this long convoluted story that revolves around the grief AOL gave him because his name is spelled vaguely similarly to the s-word, and the filter put him into a state where it let him get far enough in registration to bill his credit card, but not to actually log in. And this was oh, 10-15 years ago. Interesting to see they haven’t solved that problem yet.
What’s weird is that, now that I’ve cut down on the number of filter words, the number of comments that have gone into moderation, rather than diminishing, has increased! Go figure.
We had this same problem at Neo’s new site. Except there, it was blocking words like “bonus” and “Somalia” because Somalia has ‘soma’, a drug, in it.
Could you add quotation marks to the words in order for it to block the word and only that word? What about adding spaces to differentiate a word from a word containing a spam blocked word?
From personal experience, Akismet also blocks you if you keep posting comments in a short amount of time. Which means I’m a special target.
Good suggestions in comment 3, Y, although they don’t seem to work in Askiment.