politics

Testing Moderation Plugins.

65 Comments

I’m tweaked my personal “troll control” plugin. The tweak was motivated by two visitors who are changing their “name” and “email” to comment. Once does so frequently; one less frequently. The former person tends to post what I consider very trollish comments and many versions of his “name” and “email” were already entered into Troll Control. I suspect he may be a reincarnation of TCO, or maybe not. The other one just seems to like to assume different personalities by changing names, and isn’t a huge huge problem. However, he recently appeared as “gavin”; that’s not his name. It’s not his ordinary handle. Though many don’t know it, I encourage visitors to use unique names (i.e. Andrew_KY, Andrew_FL etc.) This means if you are not “gavin_giss”, you can’t use gavin, because he already uses that name.

So, in light of recent events, I modified troll control as follows:

  1. All comments still pass through “SpamKarma” and “Akismet”, which check spam in general. If a comment doesn’t survive this, it will go to Spam. (I can fish these out.)
  2. Each comment is screened to determine whether the name/email combination already shows at least 2 approved comments. Those with fewer than 2 approved comments moderated. This does mean you will be moderated if you change your email address, but I’ll probably release you from moderation pretty quickly.
  3. Each comment is screened against some IP, name and email addresses I have manually entered in “Troll Controll”. Comments from these people are not banned, but they are moderated. I mostly moderate people if I think they repeatedly behave in ways that derail conversations. I approve them if I think the specific comments seem moderately useful to the on going conversation. There are two people whose parameters are entered: TCO and a 2nd person who may or may not be TCO and who left the short snippet ‘asdf’ which admins will recognize as a possible hint that the person is TCO.
  4. I am going to rename the recent “gavin” comments “gavin_impersonator”. That means the person with that email can get past moderation by entering his name as “gavin_impersonator” but not as ‘gavin’.

65 thoughts on “Testing Moderation Plugins.”

  4. This should definitely moderate because it says denier denialist Hitler Goebbels Mao Stalin

  7. So, would this be an appropriate time to reveal that anthropogenic warming fears are indeed all all part of an elaborate crypto-communistic plot foisted upon the unwashed masses by a centruies long conspiracy involving the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Club of Rome, the Free Masons, and the entire cast and crew of Sesame Street?

    I can’t believe that carrot eater publicly posted the secret passphrase, “denier denialist Hitler Goebbels Mao Stalin”.

  8. Carrot–
    Spam Karma must think you have good karma to get the first two words through. The actual dictators names aren’t in any blacklist though.

    I’ve clarified what I was testing. The think about plugins is there is an order hierarchy, and if it’s screwed up, “Troll Control” works before SpamKarma and it does no good. I need the logic of the various plugins to work and to work in the right order.

    Anyway, I wanted to solve two new-to-me commenting issues. One is a habit I would like to discourage. These are 1) people changing names for not-very-good reasons when commenting and 2) people who have been put into “Troll Control” doing their best to reverse engineer work arounds.

    The tweaks will only inconvenience those who do (1) a little, but it should inconvenience those who do (2) a lot.

  9. What more does one have to do to get moderated around here?

    That was a little disappointing.

  10. Andrew_KY (Comment#47517)-I know, right?

    Funny story for people who don’t know about how we came to have our handles. They came from where Lucia identified our IP addresses as from. What’s funny about it is that I actually live in Florida, KY lives in Ohio not Kentucky. It get’s better though, see, last summer (maybe it was longer ago?) I commented here once while in a hotel in…Kentucky.

    Well, maybe not that funny, but I like the story.

  12. Carrot–
    No one has been outright banned because I came up with the moderation plugin.

    In addition to his general obnoxious demeanor, TCO used to discuss his desire vis a vis Sarah Palin, pester me to crochet him slippers on thread unrelated to needle work. If you read through TCO comments here and at other blogs, you might see what he’s like. I deleted the worst of them, but here’s a response I wrote after deleting one:

    TCO– No comments with the F word or discussing your desire to make babies. They are gone, gone gone. Not just Troll Controlled. I think i deleted the youtube too.

    If I recall correctly, at Tamino’s there was a period of time when TCO admitted to posting while drunk. It’s was all just grating. I’m willing to let him post provided he learns to be less obnoxious. TCO also wrote comments that appeared to indicate he thought he got to decide what my moderation policy should be.

    For a while, he posted while moderated, but eventually, he stopped.

    This other entity who may be TCO has an IP in a different country from TCO. However, it’s also posting comments discussing the relatively merits of knitting and weaving, explaining why I shouldn’t knit, and being generally a PITA. It also posted the “asdf” bit, which might suggest he at least knows TCO’s past fake email address. He appeared here and at Bart’s at the time Keith interviewed us and he was equally obnoxious at Barts. His posts are under “phinniethewoo” include

    “http://rankexploits.com/musings/2010/kloor-interviews-lucia-and-bart/”

    I like knitting btw as a technology and mathematical artefact not for its Mahatma Ghandi allure. Weaving with machine like tools is ageold. the Greek and Romans were not knitting.

    To knit for a hobby is like anoraks that stick to pushing wedges around : the wheel is to sophisticated for them?

    I don’t believe in knitting.

    and

    Lucia,

    I had a long hard thought now about knitting and I think it is not a worthwhile activity to pursue.
    Please stop this.

    Do not get me wrong, I do see value in studying threads and weaving techniques.

    And so on.

    He seems to have changed his handle several times, and most recently posted as “knittingintnl” on the Replication post. The first comment consists of one word: “poop”.

    That’s pretty much the sort of thing you need to do to get moderated. (You can also get moderated for endless posts involving nothing more than rhetorical questions.)

  13. Well, I don’t have IP addresses, but other evidence. First, I think Phinniethewoo’s sense of humour is entirely different than TCO’s. Also, TCO is reformed, now regularly visiting a gym for his kicks instead whatever he used before.

    I have before and after vignettes for TCO at a general interest blog, and I can tell you the difference is as night and day, well at least as different as twilight and dawn(couldn’t resist), but he is as sharp and edgy as ever.

    I’m surprised that I defend TCO, considering what he’s had to say about me in the past, but there it is.
    ==================

  14. Kim–
    If “Phinnie” is not “TCO”, then I have two people’s parameters in “Troll Control”.

    Many of us think TCO is pretty sharp. Unfortunately, he has an obnoxious streak that caused him to be banned at many blogs. If he’s behaving, that’s great.

  15. I think we got crossed up. I’m not sad that nobody is banned; I’m upset that my best attempt at getting into the moderation queue failed. I need to brush up on my anti-social skills.

  16. If I recall correctly, at Tamino’s there was a period of time when TCO admitted to posting while drunk.

    Wait. Who posts sober?

  17. Carrot–
    Well.. there are the people who are moderated because I explicitly made that choice. Then there are people who are moderated because Akismet or SpamKarma moderated them.

    Akismet and SpamKarma are mostly designed to fight robo-spam. SpamKarma compares IPs to known spammers, words to known spam terms (pharmaceuticals will hang you up), whether you took a reasonable time to post a comment (enter a comment in 1 millisecond, and SpamKarma won’t like you) and other things like that.

    It gives negative karma points for those things. Then, it give positive karma points for things like: Your browser is javascript enabled and fills out an invisible script with each comment, your name and email appeared in the database sometime between 1 day and 30 days ago and stuff like that.

    I can also add words to a “whitelist” or a “blacklist”, and SpamKarma will add points to people whose comments include those.

    After checking about 50 things, SpamKarma tallies stuff. If you are below some level I set (say -50 karma points) you are just deleted. Above that but below some other level (say -10 karma points) you are set to spam. Between -10 and 0, you go to moderation. If you pass all these, Spam Karma approves your comment.

    You had enough “positive Karma” to sneak through a few bad words.

    But then you pass through troll controll, where I deal with the people who I think need controlling. You aren’t in that list and you have numerous comments using “carrot eater” and the same email you always use. So, that’s not a problem.

  18. Hmm.

    So if, just as an experiment, I enter the names of certain pharmaceutical products, would that go on my permanent record here for the spam filter, or would it only hurt my chances of getting that one post through?

  19. Carrot–
    I’m not sure. Once SpamKarma thinks you are a spammer, I sometimes have to fish you out. My guess is you would get through though. SpamKarma doesn’t keep a permanent record of your comment, but it decides to “suspect” your IP, name, email etc.

    What you really don’t want to do is make Akismet angry though. That would happen if I manually sent you to spam. Akismet is used at many WordPress blogs, so you can hang yourself up at a whole bunch of blogs.

  20. I’m a little slow.
    Long ago, I posted a comment to an NYT discussion of taverns and the wisdom or lack thereof of drinking. On hitting “submit” I was told that my comment awaited moderation.

    I had thought it was plenty moderate already given the topic. Nuts.

    BTW, “Nuts” will get you moderated at Washpo.

  21. Since many have tried a live test. I shall too, just to see if my last joking comment got to “L”.

    Dog gone it!!! Not moderated. Went right through.

  22. I started reading here only recently, so I don’t know this TCO. Apparently I missed his purls of wisdom.

  24. My last post, June 16 was not only moderated but deleted. I did not use any bad words or go off topic. I win!

  25. Swift–
    The blog has also been having server problems. Some people’s comments just got munched unintentionally. I think I have that problem resolved– but I’m watching over the next few days.

    Micheal– No. That’s a real question. 🙂

  26. carrot eater (Comment#47529)
    “I need to brush up on my anti-social skills.”

    Very good vegan one.

    Boris (Comment#47531)
    “Wait. Who posts sober?”

    Right on!

    Lucia,

    Thanks for your very interesting and amusing blog – my rare posts are lightweight compared to your many deep thinkers but I enjoy reading everything. It must be a lot of work keeping all this going and keeping a decent environment for everyone and I appreciate your efforts.

  27. Wait… would i get the spam treatment if I asked you to knit a COMMIE-NAZI-ECOTERRORIST-WOMANIZING-AL GORE voodoo doll?

  28. I wonder if “Godwin’s Law” should make it through the spam filter?

    Phinniethewoo speaks Dutch, don’t think TCO does that.

  29. Hi Lucia,

    If you are interested in this sort of thing, you may like to have a look at what gets discussed at a blog of a presently banned Wikipedian ‘GoRight’. E.g. http://pediawatch.wordpress.com/2010/06/22/obvious-sock-likely-connolley/ Which is not to say that I endorse the opinions of GoRight but to let you know about what a huge problem it is for Wikipedia.

    In Wikipedia the behaviour you’ve described is called ‘sockpuppetry’ and it’s a deadly sin and you’d be banned forever for ever doing it, assuming there was some way of them catching you actually doing it. We don’t know who does it, because the only people with the administrative rights to check are the administrators and some of them are suspect themselves.

    I will bring your post to the attention of the Wikipedians who are watching this. It may even be an idea to compare notes. It would not surprise me in the slightest if the people doing this at your site are the same people vandalising Wikipedia.

    Best,
    Alex

  31. to knit a COMMIE-NAZI-ECOTERRORIST-WOMANIZING-AL GORE voodoo doll?
    Hmmm… that’s an idea!

    (You’d only get the spam treatment if you kept asking after several “nos”.)

  32. Lucia,

    I will follow this to see how it works out. I have recently had to start moderating my blog to eliminate third world spammers. It is a PITA that I could do without.

    Dallas

  33. Alex–
    I don’t have any reason to believe what’s happening here has anything to do with William Connelley. Sock puppetry happens everywhere.

    I think the moderated “Phinnie” person was just trying to get around moderation. It doesn’t sound like William Connelley!

  34. EA O’Connor–Thanks. That worked!
    Dallas– I guess I should make this plugin more widely available. I haven’t wanted to because I don’t want to support it.

  35. Alex, that’s good to hear that Wikipedia is catching on to William Connolley’s disinformation. It was almost enough to damn open source encyclopedias, and it has certainly hurt Wikipedia’s reputation.
    ====================

  39. Ron–
    At least at other blogs, Phinnie doesn’t post long repetitious irrelevant-to-the-post-topic diatribes about the worthlessness of knitting. If it weren’t for that, I might not have moderated him/her. At this point, Phinnie would have to post something that seems very insightful before I will let it’s posts through moderation. (Or, Phinnie could promise to never post about knitting except on when I actually post on knitting which happens more in winter than summer.)

  40. I did not mean that to come across as some sort of soft-defense of phinnie/knittingintl. He is the most caustic troll I’ve seen around – and on climate blogs that is saying something.

  41. Off-topic, there are two interesting threads on the use of the T******** P****** in Mann08 that are in progress.

    AGW Consensus advocate Arthur Smith posted Where’s the fraud? on 6/27/10 at Not Spaghetti.

    AGW Consensus advocate Ari Jokimäki posted Tiljander on 6/28/10 at AGW Observer.

    To my knowledge, Ari is the first AGW Consensus advocate to publically change their view from “Mann08 handled this issue correctly” to “Mann08 is wrong on this point.”

    Eh — that name is the very title of Ari’s post, so perhaps SpamKarma will send this comment to purgatory anyway. So…

    Tiljander Proxies! Denialist!! Hitler!!!

  42. Well, I did manage to provoke SpamKarma or Akismet just now, in a comment that mentions two recent posts about the use of… certain… proxies in the Mann08 paleotemperature reconstruction paper.

    Arthur Smith posted Where’s the fraud? on 6/27/10. And Ari Jokimäki posted T******** on 6/28/10.

  43. Alex,

    That analysis seems to be… stretching it a tad. Especially the non-overlapping non-editing sleep time. Also, methinks GoRight could use a more productive hobby 😛

  44. Heh, I remember how appalled you were at the behaviour and the rhetoric of the alarmists at Stoat and Cruel Mistress. They still don’t get it.
    ==============

  45. Ron–
    Yes. He’s caustic. But I tolerate a lot. The irrelevant posts lecturing me about knitting suggest to me that he intends to be caustic and cause troll eruptions. Lots of people are seen as caustic when they disagree about something. But that’s not quite the same as intentionally trying to start fights.

    To some extent, giving me the impression that you intend to be caustic and cause troll eruptions is the biggest no-no.

    Zeke
    I agree about GoRight’s analysis. Maybe WMC did create a sockpuppet to get around being banned from editing FredSinger’s Wikipedia page. Or maybe he didn’t. Whether or not he did, GoRight sure wants to spend a lot of time trying to uncover this. I guess it’s up to the Wikipedia addicts who have traveled up sufficiently high into the Wiki-admin upper echelons to decide. I’m not going to worry about possible sockpuppetry at Wikipedia.

  46. AMac–
    Actually, that was due to the server glitch I’m trying to resolve. SpamKarma provides logs, and your comment AMac (Comment#47591) was not processed. These always go into the spam bin.

    SpamKarma provides logs like this:

    ID Level Message Component How Long Ago

    73675 4 Successfully updated comment entry ID: 47594 to status: approved.sk2_anubis_plugin 34 minutes 2010-06-30 07:04:38

    73674 5 2 whitelist matches. for comment ID 47594. Adding 18.81 karma points. (7408 = 184.75.21.138 [x1], 1507 = yaleclimatemediaforum.org [x1])sk2_blacklist_plugin 34 minutes 2010-06-30 07:04:38

    73673 4 Successfully updated comment entry ID: 47593 to status: approved.sk2_anubis_plugin 36 minutes 2010-06-30 07:02:01

    73672 4 Successfully updated comment entry ID: 47592 to status: approved.sk2_anubis_plugin 44 minutes 2010-06-30 06:54:17

    73671 5 3 whitelist matches. for comment ID 47592. Adding 24.3 karma points. (5131 = 65.222.202.130 [x1], 2987 = shumwaysmith.com [x1], 1043 = wordpress.com [x1])sk2_blacklist_plugin 44 minutes 2010-06-30 06:54:17

    73670 4 Successfully updated comment entry ID: 47590 to status: approved.sk2_anubis_plugin 1 hour, 5 minutes 2010-06-30 06:33:04

    73669 5 2 whitelist matches. for comment ID 47590. Adding 13.26 karma points. (8880 = 174.22.147.252 [x1], 1043 = wordpress.com [x1])sk2_blacklist_plugin
    1 hour, 5 minutes 2010-06-30 06:33:04

    I can see that 47591 was not processed. The fact that your comment was not processed shows I’m still having those pesky server issues, though it seem to me I’m having fewer.

    Because I use the “akismet sub module” SpamKarma actually uses Akismet as one of the tests. So, 47591 did not go to Akismet either.

    One of the reasons I can’t predict whether a person will have enough “karma” to include “spam karma” words is that the number of karma points added for “good” stuff depends on whether you match an IP in the spamkarma list. Mostly, spamkarma creates that based on comments that have been previously approved without later being overridden by me. It whitelists, blacklists and greylists urls on the same basis. (Things on Blogspot are greylisted. Spamkarma will never whitelist of blacklist something on those domains on it’s own. I can add individual ones manually.)

  47. Hmm… It’s a good thing I posted this. I’m cleaning up the domainblack list files. A few urls that should not be blacklisted crept into the blacklist. (I know how this happens. : ) )

  53. oh well.

    Hoi Polloi’s poem is better anyway, esp as haiku.
    May have missed the syllables a bit,
    but is wonderfully (and correctly) evocative.

    Just btw, the double post occurred this way:

    Submit a comment …
    Receive an internal server error …
    Backspace
    Refresh and Verify that last comment is not yet posted
    Reenter the comment
    Submit the comment again
    Heh! Now there are two!

  57. I don’t know about you guys, but there ain’t enough money in the world that would get me to give Big Al a massage in the first place. 😉

    Andrew

  58. Oh, come on Andrew… he’s a total sex poodle! (although I do wonder why he felt he needed her there at 1AM)

  60. I’m putting this here because comments are closed on all the Arctic sea ice threads.

    June JAXA sea ice extent data are now complete. The final average was 10.03041153 Mm2.

    The loss rate slowed a bit on the last day, only -45,000 km2.

  63. I thought phinnie was great while at Bart. Maybe I have a high threshold for tolerance. ‘Cause he was funny. I like funny warmists too, hard to find though.
    .
    I don’t understand the knitting thing too. Why! 😉
    .

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