I was having a private discussion with Rojisan in #joiito who suggested to extend the mt-bayesian plugin to become an immunity system for the blogsphere when we got sidetracked.

One of the reasons we have blog spammers is because they want to get more links to their site and therefore higher Googlerank for their site. Therefore, if we remove this “feature” for them gain google rank, we would also remove the incentive for them to blogspam. Rojisan then gave me to challenge to the plugin in 30 mins so I did.

Download it here: mt-redirect-1.0.tar.gz (Documentation on Wiki)

Update 16/01: MT 2.661 already implemented this feature (and done it better) so go get it!

Merry Christmas!

I have a lovely present this christmas: A blog spammer. :-)

As I have a captcha plugin, the poor guy have been entering comment manually using innocent looking comment (e.g. “Yes, this is a good page”).

Unfortunate for him, I trained my blog engine (using mt-bayesian) to identify his spam in the morning and when he tried it again in the evening, my blog has successful tag them as spam. (I still display spams for testing but I probably should stop displaying them totally soon)

Lovely to see how adaptive my mt-bayesian is :-)
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I haven’t been blogging because I have been spending almost all my free time working on a Distributed Address Book List (DABL) which I called PonG. (Download)

PonG is a tool which allows you and your friends to keep up-to-date (contact) information of each another.

PonG package includes a PonG server and a PonG client.

You keep your personal profile information on your PonG server and define which friends can access what information.

Your friends will use their PonG clients to communicate with your PonG server and keep their address book up-to-date.

If you try this software, would appreciate if you leave a comment or a trackback.

Incidently, my PonG URL http://james.seng.sg/pong/xmlrpc.php. If you want a customized userid/passwd, drop me an email. (Use PonG client to get my email). (I know we need autodiscovery…that will be in the next version, I promise)

Suggestions and Feedbacks are welcome.

* DABL is coined by Ross M Karchner after brainstorm session on #joiito.

* Update 4th Dec : Just release version 1.0 which includes a varity of performance improvement and features. See Changelog for more details.

Jay Allen, the author of MT-blacklist, commented in a discussion at Q Daily News:

While I will agree that many blacklist implementations and models are flawed, I still haven’t heard an valid criticism specifically of MT-Blacklist’s implementation (other than a couple of bugs which will be ironed out in the next version), but would be happy to hear some and adapt the program as necessary to best serve the needs of the community.

I take a quick look at MT-blacklist. The whole logic to determine if a comment or ping is spam or not comes down to this:

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Update: Michah Valine has taken over the maintenance of MT-Bayesian

Update: Please read the problems with MT-Bayesian.

Many people have complained about my “Solution for comments spams” is unfriendly to disabled or those who do not have a graphic browser.

Hearing your feedbacks, I spent the last 2 days working on a bayesian plugin. To cut the story short, the plugin will allow you to train your movabletype blog to automatically identify spam comments and pings.

Download it here: mt-bayesian-1.1.tar.gz (Documentation)

[I just installed SimpleComments plugin and modify the templates so it will also display spam but will blockquote them. Check it out. :-]
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Update 4th Feb 2005: Looking for a solution to deal with Trackback spams? Take a look at my TrackbackAntiSpam?

Apparently, there are some automated bots which has been spamming comments on movabletype blogs. While it is easy to ban the IP and remove the posts, it takes a lot of time and effort to play the cat and mouse game.

To cut the story short, I wrote a plugin to MT that will verify if it is a human before it allows comments to be posted. The idea is pretty simple: Display an image with a Security Code and demand the user to enter a Security Code manually before allowing posting to go through.

To see how it works, try posting some comments on this site. [Update 4th July: This is running Drupal but I ported this plugin to Drupal so it works on the site again :-)]

If you like it, you can download it here. (It is pretty rough since I skip my sleep to do this. But it should work. I hope I have covered most of edge cases…)

Update 15th Oct 2003: I wrote another MT plugin which allows you to train your MT to automatically identify spam comments. And it works for trackback too!

Update 2nd Nov 2004: scode-0.1b.tar.gz is available with instructions on MT 3.x and also answering several commonly answered questions.

Update 11th Dec 2004: This entry is now a spam magnet (see today blog entry). At least one comment spammer is attacking this entry to test their technique. I am going to leave this open however so I can use this opportunity to learn their tactic so as to know how to fight them better. In the meantime, don’t be surprise to see this entry get flooded with spams if they got through. (Werid that they choose to attack this entry which is no longer running on movabletype :-)

Update 13th Dec 2004: scode-0.1c.tar.gz is now available with additional script to test your GD installation if you can’t get the image working properly.

Quick Links:
– Download latest mt-scode
– You need GD for this plugin to work
– You also need GD.pm

People who has offered to help with installing the plugin:
– a littlegroup.com

For all those found their SCode suddenly stop working, read this from Elisabet’s provider:

Hi Elisabet,
there was a problem with the way cPanel was installing GD. The developer created a script to “clean” any buggy GD installations and re-install. Once I cleaned the installation the script worked ok.

Christine

Here is a rant from Esther Dyson, the editor of Release1.0 on Goggle of Blogging, Technorati.

Although the premise of the blog world is decentralized, bottom-up, user-centered content, the value of Technorati-like services is in clustering: helping users to find like-minded people, or unlike-minded people with similar interests.

(Incidently, a little bird told me in IRC that Evan Williams, the founder of blogger.com actually helps Esther to set up her own blog at ETCon few months back).

Trying out w.blogger.

This blog entry is updated via w.blogger…I wonder if the the autotrack back works…Hmm…

Just did a quick hack on Movable Type engine so that it will use Trackback mechanism to do publicity instead of XMLRPC-ping.