p2pnet.net news:- We’ve been running a p2pnet survey since Monday, March 12, and as I write this, there’ve been 58 responses from about 250 views. I say ‘about’ because I don’t know the number of times I’ve personally accessed the survey form, but I’m guessing 15. The exact number (at 11:06 PST) was 265.

I’ll let the survey run for a while longer before I do a full report on the results, but for now, one of the questions asks, What do you like least about p2pnet? And comment spam still comes up.

It’s bad, no question, and it’s been like that for quite a while. There’s now a verification system in place which cuts a lot of it, but by no means all, and I’ve only recently learned how to deal with it myself using phpMyAdmin.

Before someone told me how to properly configure phpMyAdmin about a month ago, I’d been labouriously going through the comments one-by-one. There was a huge backlog of them and it took me weeks to clear it.

These days, the first thing I do in the morning is see what arrived during the night. Then I kill it off. I also check periodically during the day and delete new arrivals as often as possible.

It used to be that gaming sites were the worst, but these are now few and far between. A few individuals post by hand, but for the last two or three months the vast bulk of the spam has been from Angelfire, largely Chinese porn.

I realize it’s as much of a pain for parasite hosts as it is for everyone on the receiving end.

Angelfire is owned by Lycos and the company’s media spokeswoman, Kathy O’Reilly, told me:

Although Lycos is an ISP only and not responsible for the acts of and content uploaded by users who use Angelfire’s templates to build their own websites, Lycos, of course, takes the issue of spamming very seriously and tries to act proactively in preventing spammers from infiltrating its services.

Unfortunately, the reality is that certain bad-actors eventually find new ways to get around abuse prevention mechanisms. There simply is no foolproof system. Nonetheless, when a suspected spamming site is brought to our attention, Lycos investigates that site immediately, and, if spamming activities are discovered, Lycos takes the site down and terminates the relevant user account.

However, because Lycos offers a free service via Angelfire, individuals who are caught and shut down often create new user accounts under different aliases and with different email addresses attached to those accounts. It is very difficult to prevent this from happening.

To be sure, Lycos disdains spammers just as much as the average internet user and Lycos too is a victim of spammers. It costs Lycos considerable money and resources to deal with spamming activities, not to mention the damage spamming causes to Lycos’s goodwill, such as in cases like this. But because it’s impossible for Lycos to assure that spammers do not access and misappropriate its services before the fact, Lycos encourages individual site owners to secure comment forms and protect their websites by using some form of “captcha” and/or by blocking the offending IP addresses from visiting their sites.

‘Captcha’ is that form which asks you to fill in numbers and letters to make sure you’re human and not a spam-bot. And I admit, it was pretty bad for quite a while and I wasn’t able to improve it until very recently.

“The bot-testing thingy in order to post,” says one survey response. “I stopped posting because of it. To much of a hassle when you have to try over 2-3 times. Or change firewall settings in order to post (ie cookies).”

Yup. I know.

“The catchpa,” says another. “I understand the reason and know why. It’s gotten better at displaying in FireFox but still needs a small amount of tweeking.”

“Spam in the comments,” says another, “but what ya gonna do LOL.”

What I’m gonna do is keep on manually deleting the spam throughout the day, and check out a new system I’ve heard about which relies on images instead of text. So bear with me.

For now, the comment area is one of the most important p2pnet features so even if it takes a bit of effort, please keep on posting : )

Cheers! And thanks …
Jon

Slashdot it!

If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at thIs the end (of the Net) nigh?zze University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.

---

rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php | | And use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site

---

Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 18th, 2007 at 1:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 1377 times