Shadow of Cerberus EVE Community Forum

Proof against bots

First thing, the second New Eden Open finals get started in a few minutes as I publish this. Today ought to be amusing since CCP is admitting a live audience into their studio. Will someone in the audience do something... ummm... unexpected on camera? We'll know soon.

With that out of the way, a quickie: I have turned off moderation for comments on this blog for posts ten or fewer days old. This is kind of an experiment.

I have the last major EVE blog that accepts anonymous comments. Pretty much everyone else has turned off the ability to comment anonymously, because anonymous comments generate two things on a blog:

• Trolling. But I can handle this one. I have a pretty thick skin.
• Spam advertising. This one is a lot more problematic to me.

Blogger's spam filter is fairly reasonable, catching a high percentage of the spam that is attempted on this blog. I would say it catches something like 98%. But it's not uncommon to get 350 comments/week around here, which potentially means that six to eight spam comments are going to get through per week around here without me catching them in advance.

But overall this strikes me as a fair trade-off for you guys to have the ability to have conversations with each other without me getting in the way. So, I'm going to let things run this way for a while and see how things go. But if I find either the spam or the trolling (particularly of other commenters) becomes excessive, I'll decide then whether to follow my fellow bloggers by turning anonymous comments off, or go back to my old system of the "Jester filter."

Comments?
Source: Proof against bots