Paid in Full
Sunday, October 16, 2005 at 6:10pm 4 comments (last by mattymatt)
Dear Blog,
I know these last few weeks we haven't seen much of each other. You are not far from my thoughts though, and even if you haven't seen much of me lately, I'm sure you are glad I've been doing so much to help our friends.
Ryan is happy to have a new design, even if it is still a work in progress. I did some template work on for Laurel and Edu (she's planing to visit him in Barcelona too!)
Poor Jesse has been bombarded by comment spam, which I feel a bit bad about because Movable Type 3.2 has pretty much eliminated comment spam for everyone else I know. He's been kind enough though to give me an account on contrasts.net so I could fine tune the spam filters. After my last changes and additions to the filters yesterday, spam that would have gotten through before is now coming back with scores as high as -8 (all it would have needed was -1 to be caught). I think I'll write up a post later about what I did.
After he read the last entry I posted, Matteo took me out for dinner last week to thank me for the design I've been working up for his blog. He is really excited about it, and I've found it gratifying that from his couple brief description of "wanting something like my chemistry notebooks at work" I could come up with a design that so closely matched (even down to the color of the graph paper!) having never seen a chemistry notebook before. And yes, I know, I can't believe the monospace font looks so good either! Panchesco is the only one I feel has ever pulled it off well, so I did so many other combinations first before I even gave it a try.
I really hope to get Matteo's new design finished this week. I've got a concept for Andrew I want to start on next, but I promise to make for more quality time between us.
4 Comments
Jamison Tuesday, October 18, 2005 at 7:08am
What do you mean you don't have any way to block domains and text patterns? Didn't you install the SpamLookup plug-ins that came with 3.2? You should read Neil Turner's article on learning MT.
mattymatt Thursday, October 20, 2005 at 12:55pm
spamlookup is very useful, but clearly not perfect since a lot of spam still gets through. since the blacklist is now maintained by someone else, we can't modify it to fit our needs. for example, almost all of our spams start with the phrase "in your free time please consider sites in their field of" ... MT-B made it very easy to write a rule that blocked those. but with spamlookup, we have to wait for someone else to do that.
mattymatt Thursday, October 20, 2005 at 12:58pm
oh wait -- seconds after writing that, i found the spot where you can in fact do that, in the plugin setting screen. so it is possible after all.
but i still liked how MT-B did things better -- four clicks and a URL was in your blacklist, rather than having to manually add it to a field on the plugin settings page.
mattymatt Monday, October 17, 2005 at 11:50pm
eh, upgrading to 3.2 made the comment/trackback spam worse than ever on sfist. since MT-blacklist isn't supposed to work with 3.2, we don't have any way of blacklisting domains or text patterns, so we keep getting the same spams over and over -- on average one spam every 30 to 60 seconds -- for the same sites, and we can't block them. sigh.