One of the side effects of no longer requiring registration to post comments on cvillenews.com is that now I have to battle spammers. (There were 1,026 attempts to post spam comments in the last week alone.) This means that legitimate comments are sometimes being wrongly identified as spam, which sucks. I’ve just reduced the strength of the anti-spam system, meaning fewer good messages will be blocked, but more spam will get through, which I’ll delete when I spot it. Bear with me. #
News and meta-news about Charlottesville, VA, since 2001.
Sideblog
Police announced this afternoon that their investigation into what was initially believed to be a fatal fire on Rugby Avenue is now a homicide investigation. #
The Virginia Supreme Court has denied George Huguely’s appeal. His second-degree murder conviction will stand, WRIC reports. #
In a carefully worded story, and not citing specific sources, WTVR reports that forensic evidence belonging to Jesse Matthew Jr., the main suspect in the disappearance of Hannah Graham, matches forensic evidence collected during the investigation of Morgan Harrington’s 2009 murder. #
In the wake of Hannah Graham’s disappearance, and the evidence that came from private security footage, city officials are revisiting the question of installing security cameras on the downtown mall. #
Both Charlottesville Registrar Sheri Iachetta and former Electoral Board member Stephanie Commander have turned themselves in to the police on
foursix and four felony counts of embezzlement, respectively. #Ten years ago, the National Institutes of Health budget doubled and schools like the University of Virginia built massive new research facilities. A decade later, those buildings remain largely underutilized. NPR visits UVA in this story on the effect of federal binge and spurge spending in the sciences. #
In 2012, Council approved a new student housing complex on West Main—now some council members are questioning whether what they were shown matches what was built. #
The Architectural Review Board has approved a bike-themed mural on West Market, below the McGuffey Art Center, although at least one member expressed concerns that it might look like the bicyclists were riding away from Charlottesville’s downtown. #
City Police Chief Tim Longo is meeting with city leaders to work on protocols regarding the use of military surplus police weapons in Charlottesville. #
A 100-year-old Colonnades resident received military honors for her service in the WWII Women’s Army Corps #
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Archive for Sideblog »
Hi Waldo,
Are you running Akismet? That should knock out most of the spam for you. If you add Bad Behavior as well, about 99% of spam will be eliminated.
Good luck in the never-ending fight!
Andrew
I’ve been running both Bad Behavior and Akismet. Bad Behavior has been doing just fine (save for its reliance on overly-broad RBLs), but Akismet has wrongly been flagging about 2% of all cvillenews.com comments as spam. That’s an enormous false positive rate. So the change that I’ve made, that spurred this blog entry, was disabling Akismet, because it’s clearly not working here.
Interesting. I’ve not heard of Akismet having so many false positives. I hope it works out for you.
I use Akismet on a half dozen other blogs, and I’ve never had a false-positive rate like this. Clearly something about the discussions here — whether the IPs, the words used, or the user names — runs counter to what Akismet is accustomed to.
you know Waldo, I am not a big fan of the death penalty but I would make a exception for creators of spam. What a waste of resource trying so hard to get your point across. And all for what? Out of the gizzion spams you make, like .0001% actually fall for it.
keep up the great work!
Waldo, you might consider contacting the folks over at Automattic. If your comment stream is a rich source of false positives, they’ll (hopefully) want to take a look at where their software is going wrong.
That’s a good idea — will do.