After a certain amount of research and thought, I have decided to institute the simplest possible change to the blog. I have now closed Blogger comments and installed Haloscan.
It shouldn’t be too difficult to use; I think the instructions are self-explanatory. We’ll see how this goes.
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Previously a lifelong Democrat, born in New York and living in New England, surrounded by liberals on all sides, I've found myself slowly but surely
June 29th, 2006 at 4:28 pm
See how easy? Piece of cake.
June 29th, 2006 at 4:36 pm
Way to go, Neo.
June 29th, 2006 at 5:15 pm
Looks good!
June 29th, 2006 at 6:00 pm
Wow,
I can feel the IQ level shooting back up already.
Seriously, while it is a shame a step like this is necessary, I think it was worthwhile.
Neo, as always, keep up the good work.
WG
June 29th, 2006 at 6:33 pm
Thanks.
June 29th, 2006 at 6:40 pm
Excellent, ma’am. Thank you.
Just a minor point: HaloScan bans by IP address, and many internet service providers assign “dynamic” ones (meaning that they can and do change regularly). So unfortunately, there’ll be a bit of work maintaining any ban because all an unwelcome commenter needs to do is wait for or force a change to their IP address. But this should be sufficient for now.
I thank you for your work, and must say I’m very appreciative of the effort you dedicate to this blog. I imagine that it must feel thankless at times, but rest assured, the large majority of your audience appreciates what you’re doing.
June 29th, 2006 at 6:47 pm
Yay! I can comment again.
Watch out for the spambots, though.
June 29th, 2006 at 6:50 pm
Big Hummus, I believe the current release allows banning entire IP ranges. Requires a little research with determining what ISP “owns” what ranges, but it solves the dynamic IP problem. It is much more flexible than previous releases. Shame on me, I hadn’t been keeping up with it.
June 29th, 2006 at 6:57 pm
So, how is this different?
June 29th, 2006 at 8:31 pm
Well, so far so good — no obvious trolls. Which is certainly different, and reason for some satisfaction. Congrats, neo (tentatively).
June 29th, 2006 at 9:28 pm
There went the IQ level, alas.
June 29th, 2006 at 9:46 pm
That’s right little fella. Only if the commenter allows it. HaloScan comments doesn’t recognize the Blogger profile. And, you can enter a “null” web page so that the FFM’s can’t find other blogs to infest.
June 29th, 2006 at 9:49 pm
That’s true, Wasp, but the problem is that banning by range isn’t really efficient. A person won’t necessarily get an IP adjacent to their old one (for example 206.20.20.20, then to 206.20.20.21 or .19), and some ISP’s won’t even have adjacent subnets. So an IP can vary wildly even within the same ISP. Not to mention the fact that doing so would run the risk of cutting off other, innocent commenters.
I’ve seen some talk on some sites about more finely targeted comment filtering; it’s really developed for spam, not trolls, but it can be applied as such. Some comment engines allow for scripts to do name matching as well, and they’re squishy, so they can handle intentional misspellings, captializations, deliberate c h -an g es in sp a c ing, cAPtaLIzaTioN, and l377er/ch4r4c73r s|_|bs7iTut10n. But really, the simplest and most effective guard is registered commenters, and I don’t mean like the Blogger-membership. Some blogs only allow commenters registered to that blog specifically.
Really, though, I’d hate to put a bigger onus on Neo than what’s already there. She’s already had to do too much to deal with the incivility of others.
June 29th, 2006 at 10:44 pm
Big Hummus, I agree but this is a fine first effort. I know our boys and they don’t know how to expire the lease on a dynamic IP and get a new one. And, it only takes a couple of iterations to pick up the ranges an ISP is using. I have a really good basic tutorial called “Source Tracing 101″ that deals specifically with excising trolls. Try Google for it. It’s too long to place here and would be of little interest anyway.
This method is fine grained enough for the nonce.
June 29th, 2006 at 11:00 pm
Neo,
I miss using Haloscan.. Used it when I had Blogger but it is not available in WordPress..
Works well though and is easy.
BTW — I have a blog on the star of the new “religious” democrat party.. Barak Obama, Check it out..
ExP
June 29th, 2006 at 11:31 pm
Ahhhh… much better. Now if I only had this feature for family gatherings.
June 30th, 2006 at 12:23 am
testing testing testing
June 30th, 2006 at 6:53 pm
Please let me be your new and personal TROLL!
Old Trolls in New comments!
June 30th, 2006 at 7:23 pm
Have never used this.Ihave grown to respect your intelligence the more I have read this.
June 30th, 2006 at 8:21 pm
Hope this works cause the trolls were getting pretty irritating.
June 30th, 2006 at 10:16 pm
No, Gerard, you and I just look like trolls. You have to act like one to get filtered out.
Been sending your Lincoln’s Land Without God post all over the place. Just dropped in her to see how th troll hammer was working and to read the new post.
July 1st, 2006 at 9:20 am
“I know our boys and they don’t know how to expire the lease on a dynamic IP and get a new one.”-Wasp
Heck, they didn’t even know how to use quotation marks…
Good riddance! And here’s hoping some opposition with manners will make itself known- it’s more fun that way.
July 1st, 2006 at 1:09 pm
Thanks, I am looking forward to satisfying my long unrequited urge to comment( instead of lurking ).
July 2nd, 2006 at 3:08 am
> Source Tracing 101
Wasp, got a link on that? I can’t find any matching reference.
P.S., you can bury links in HaloScrew with
[broket]a Href=”link here”[broket]TEXT to be hyperlinked[broket]/a[broket], for those who don’t know.
Broket equals the angle brackets, those two keys above the “.” & “,”
July 3rd, 2006 at 12:00 am
Consider yourself OWNED, trolls!
July 3rd, 2006 at 5:58 pm
LOL at Cappy “Ahhhh… much better. Now if I only had this feature for family gatherings.”