Things we value:
Democracy
Non-exclusivity
Attribution
Transparency – disclosure
Innovation
Personalization
Accessibility
Honesty
Creativity
Knowing who people are
Editorial Independence
Connectedness
Anonymity
Things we devalue:
Power law economics
Lack of Attribution
Anonymity
Wuffie-hoarding
Links for money
And this:
We also talked about how our social norms might shift as the blogosphere grows, what it means to feel cheated by someone apparently giving their own opinion, after which we find out they are being paid to write. We want disclosure and the chance to evaluate the biases people have. We want more subtle ways to understand bloggers we don’t know than simple inbound link counts, and I pointed out that top 100 lists don’t mean very much to me. There was a request for a categorization system for blogs similar to DMOZ, so that we can more easily find people talking in smaller communities.
And this:
…We talked about the assumptions we make, based on certain social and informational cues online, and whether these assumptions make sense. We agreed that relationships are very important, and behind them are various kinds of trust about the person and the information, and we need trust, good information and reputation to varying degrees to maintain our online relationships well.
Dave Winer has sold Weblogs.com, a long known ping server in blogging to Verisign for 2 million dollars.
Statement from Verisign
MT and BDBO
Those of us using the older MT platforms for our blogs no longer have Jay Allen’s MT blacklist to control spam. He did an incredible job for thousands of bloggers. Already this blog is getting hit with a lot more spam. 40 peices tonight. I can hope The Blacklist will hold worse flooding back for a bit longer.
Apparently there is a 3.2 MT platform free edition (unsupported).
Even reading the information pages makes me nuts. They are not really written for none tech people.
I don’t want unlimited blogs and one author. I want one blog and authors I can chose to add when they need a place to blog for a few days.
It’s time to talk to my tech. I have been genuinely dreading this email exchange. I am not the least bit interested in attempting to trying to figure out what unsuppored means, what it is going to cost and what the heck I’m going to have to learn or re-learn if I can upgrade. It doesn’t look like I can.
It really is getting to the point where more and more days in blogging aren’t worth it anymore, it isn’t fun, I’m fed up with technology and spam and comment spam, and weird RSS feeds and splogs. The only spam I haven’t had to deal with is trackback spam because my tech took time to at her expense to fix it. That got nicely turned off a long time ago, after getting whalloped by trackback spammers.
This request to my tech and my questions will have to be soon or I’ll have ask that this blog gets taken down.
And from where I sit all the new tech toys and tools can make things harder for those of us who genuinely hate the technical aspects of blogging.
A WP blog I’m involved in gets hit with up to several hundred peices of comment spam a day, several days a week. The spam doesn’t make it on line, but it’s at the stage where it’s taking me an hour a day just to clean up the cue and the inbox. Now this blog spam problems are starting up again.
I’ve been up nearly 24 hours dealing with real life issues and people, I’m really beat, so enough complaining. I’m grateful I can blog, but there are days the unethical people win. Grrrrrrrr.
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Comment spam is a pain, isn’t it? But WP does have some good plug-ins that can do alot to eliminate it. I get very little at connexions now.
i use livejournal and i’ve never gotten spammed and their clients are simple as heck, just not as colorful. maybe you could visit the DOTR and set up shop on the sand dune next to me.
Email spam is actually down as companies realized it was in their best interests to filter it.
And I have great respect for guys like Jay Allen who worked so hard to prevent comment spam.
Reading his last piece, the spammers won this round.
Seems fruitless to get frustrated, there are a lot of people working to eliminate this garbage. RSS feeders have told Google blogger they won’t be listed if they don’t stop spam blogs.
Complaining about spam is like complaining about raking leaves in the fall, spammers aren’t going to stop or be stopped. At best all we can do is find good rakes. In some cases, honking leaf blowers.:^)
I few ideas… some of which you may like, others not.
It looks like you are renaming you comment posting script. That’s a good start.
Don’t link to your comment script from the front page. Have the ‘Comments’ link go to your individual archive entry at the comment section.
I tend to think numeric permalinks are too easy to spam. Ie. 001794.php, 001793.php, 001792.php. The script to iterate that is trivial.
If you aren’t already, close old entries’ comment status.
Don’t put a text badge that advertises you use Movable Type on your page. If I were a script kiddy, I’d Google on the “powered by MT” string and get a nice list of targets to attack.
The last one is somewhat controversial but I’ve found it works well. Get yourself delisted from the major search engines by means of the appropriate META tags (or robots.txt) that tell the search engine bots not to index your page. Your search engine page rank will fall, but you are so blogroll listed, you’ll still get readers from their referals.
Bene-
Sorry to hear you’re getting comment-spammed. I’m seeing similar things with WP-powered blogs, especially those with high pagerank like UrbanOnramps.com. The never-fail solution is Spam Karma 2, a free WordPress plugin. Right now it’s killing about 230 a day for me, and over 400 for Rudy at UO.
I administer about 60 WordPress-powered sites and can do the migration for you (painlessly) if you are interested in hosting ($4US/mo) - just email me.
Good luck, at any rate.
Scott-
As far as I know, it isn’t necessary to know the permalink in order to send an MT comment spam. The spambot (if it’s an advanced one) finds one page with open comments, detects the comment script URL, then starts hitting the script with spam directly - it guesses the post IDs, but those stay the same even if you use non-numeric permalinks.
There’s also an MT plugin (I don’t use MT, so I don’t keep up with it) that will close the comments on old posts after a while - should be a good timesaver if you want to use that technique.
Scott: Thank you! I get to complain my tech gets to do the work. I’ll pass on this info.
Hey Justin!
I didn’t know there was a plug in to close out old comment sections, Rachel C has been doing it by hand as asked. I tried, but My SQL is not a place I want to press okay or enter.
A WP blog I administer get’s hit hard with spam, there were 743 within less than 48 hours. They go into the moderation cue but I still have to delete them. They go into the trash in the email but I still have to sort and delete because all email goes to trash.
Spam wasn’t a problem when you hosted me before, I never realized how lucky I had it.:^)
If I decide to renew, I’ll be in touch. Right now I’m so fed up I don’t know if it’s worth it to keep going.
Bless you buddy, I’ll be in touch on way or the other.