TypePad support recommends using proxy to get around their own anti-spam filters |
Loading ...Cue Antony Mayfield, another disappointed TypePad customer having trouble receiving comments on his TypePad hosted blog:
If you’ve tried to leave a comment on this blog and been unsuccessful you could try being more anonymous, according to Six Apart’s support team … The work around suggested to me by the helpdesk was to use a proxy service - they recommended unipeak.com.
Sadly, these problems aren’t anything new. I couldn’t leave comments on my own TypePad blog because of their overzealous anti-spam filters two years ago.
Ironically I learned of Antony’s troubles from TypePad competitor Mr. AutoMattic, who took this opportunity to shamelessly recommend his service instead:
Akismet is platform-agnostic, and it already works great for all self-hosted systems, why shouldn’t it be available to people on Typepad? (Or Blogger.) If the folks on Fourth street don’t want to pay for an Akismet site license (though I’m sure we could work out a discount for their volume) they could just make it an option for users to specify an API endpoint.
Unfortunately, Akismet still erroneously flags MakeYouGoHmm.com trackbacks as spam even after Matt stopped by here when I last complained in great detail about the problem. See Nathan’s comment here. I’m still happy to troubleshoot this issue with anybody from the Akismet team that wants to contact me directly. I don’t use Akismet here, but I’m happy to work though this if they actually give a damn.
My advice with blog antispam is to roll your own solution and not spend money on anybody else’s filters. If you use one of the many free filtering solutions be very careful that you aren’t filtering out sources that will help you (like Googlebot). Some of the solutions out there will filter out the good bots. At least with your own filtering solution you’ll understand what is and isn’t getting through and why. Services like Akismet and TypePad’s baked in solution are black boxes.
I’m not saying you or I can do any better ourselves, but we can hardly do worse. At least we know who to blame when nobody can leave comments on our own blog, including ourselves.
As for diverting your customers to use a proxy to get around your own craptacular filters? Assuming Antony isn’t making this TypePad help desk story up that’s the most ridculous thing I’ve heard in awhile. People keep investing in Six Apart … because?
Update 1/18/07 4:34am PST: And here’s Darren Rowse from Problogger expressing concern over Akismet’s spam filtering (emphasis mine):
I use Akismet and have noticed this happening a little more than normal lately. I’ve talked to the team at Akismet and they have told me that my blog is in the top few in terms of quantities of comment spam and that as a result there have been a few more false positives than normal.
Update 1/22/07 7:12am PST: Freevlog:
Well it turns out that the Askimet spam filter not only caught 30,000 + spam comments (thanks!) it also caught the last 40 or so legit comments.Related Posts
- Over 90% of blog comments are spam, reports Akismet
- Akismet first catch a false positive
- Mullenweg on Comment spam
- Can’t post comments on my own TypePad blog!
- Blog comment spam and SE impact: is it that significant?
- Site comments and contact update, removed Reuters TV player [site news]
I ran the content from that TB through Akismet and it wasn’t caught, so that means either it was caught by something outside of Akismet or that the system has learned and adapted to its mistake already without human intervention. (Which is what it’s designed to do.)
I invited you to email me last time you had trouble and that invitation is still open. I wouldn’t want your statistically improbable experience to leave a lasting negative impression.
Comment by Matt — January 1, 2007 @ 5:36 pm PST
Matt - thanks for checking and reporting back. I will forward this post to Nathan (blognewschannel) and see if he’s still having the same problem. Unless I missed this somewhere — and my bad if that’s the case — you never invited me to email you directly about this problem. You did invite me to fill out a contact form on the Akismet site (which I declined), but that doesn’t make any difference since I don’t use Akismet on any of our hosted blogs and have no specific data that hasn’t already been published here for you and the rest of the world to see.
You might label this a “statistically improbable experience” and yet within the last 90 days I have had two different established bloggers using different blog software and Akismet (one using MT, the other using WP) complaining about the same thing: the trackbacks from this blog are being flagged as spam by Akismet. It’s certainly possible that they are using something else in addition to Akismet that is causing problems.
Unfortunately, I’ve heard this complaint at least a half dozen times from bloggers using Akismet. That might be statistically insignificant in the overall scheme of Akismet, but it’s significant to this site considering the number of people who would not bother taking the time to tell us there was a problem. The numbers you are dealing with compared to ours are much greater, so I can understand and respect your perspective. However as a fellow software developer, a bug is a bug is a bug, no matter how infrequent it appears or unlikely it seems. The question which you raised — and it’s a good one — is it Akismet or something else these bloggers are using? I can’t answer that with the data being made available to me and thus cannot email you at this time. I do appreciate your invitation now.
But here’s what I can do:
As soon as I hear this complaint again — and of course I hope that is never — I’ll get as much data, with screenshots, from the blogger(s) and email it to you directly. Hopefully you are right and it’s fixed now and that won’t be necessary. At least I can put you in touch with the person using Akismet, since I’m just an affected third party. I invite you to watch the comments on this thread to see what Nathan has to say, if anything in the coming days. I’ve sent him other trackbacks since his last comment complaint about the issue on December 12 (three weeks ago roughly).
Comment by TDavid — January 1, 2007 @ 7:16 pm PST