RE: Blogs and Comments

Let me take a mildly contrarian approach. 

You can't stay ahead of the spammers. They've now added Trackback spam to
their repertoire. See, e.g.,
http://www.elise.com/mt/archives/000577trackback_spam.php.

I flat out don't allow comments on my blog - sort of a tribute to Ronald
Reagan's famous "Mr. Green, I paid for this microphone" moment. The spammers
have destroyed my use of my telephone with unsolicited calls, my email with
barrage after barrage of messages, and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay to
give them a platform from which to destroy blogging for me, too. If they are
going to destroy my blog experience, they are going to have to earn it the
hard way. I'm not giving them an inch this time. As for pre-approving
commenters, I'm not sure I understand why I need to do all the work  -
shouldn't the spammers do all the work? That's why they have rooms full of
programmers in Eastern Europe working all day long for anyway. Let them pay
the programmers to earn their pay instead of making me put together
whitelists and other time-consuming temporary fixes. "Whitelists" baffle me
in this context. There's no way that I could have approved in advance
comments from many of the bloggers I now count as friends.

And, blog comments would be just one more type of communication that I'd be
late in responding too and never having the time to police. My hats off to
the people who want to do the comment thing, but blog comments just seem
like the worst of all possible worlds for me. People who have something to
say to me about my blog can email me. If they have something they need to
perform in public as a response, they can use their own blog and I'll see it
here. For other blogs I might do, comments might make sense, but this blog
is the microphone I paid for. They can go ahead and send me regular spam or
call me at home during dinner, if they want, and leave my blog alone.

Finally, I remain hopeful that Congress will soon approve the CAN COMMENT
SPAM bill that should eliminate the entire problem.

By the way, to all the spam filter fans out there, thank you for your
continuing efforts to endorse programs that further destroy the remaining
utility of email. Today's example, I look unprofessional for not turning in
an article because someone's spam filters sent" blocked two emails I sent
with the articles attached.  Welcome to 1980s email all over again - "Ring,
ring. Just calling to see if you got the email I sent you."

Shouldn't this be our battle cry? "Never give in - never, never, never,
never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to
convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to
the apparently overwhelming might of the spammers."

Dennis

Dennis Kennedy
The Dennis Kennedy Law Firm, LLC
1276 Bridle Road
St. Louis, MO 63119
(314) 963-9798
dmk-zCcesvzgDd9m78FN9qvvowC/[email protected]
www.denniskennedylaw.com

Helping business executives signing important technology agreements get a
good night's sleep.

Visit my my blog at http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/




-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin O'Keefe - lexBlog [mailto:kevin-fkW/[email protected]] 
Sent: Wednesday, July 07, 2004 6:46 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [NetLawyers] Blogs and Comments

> From: "Jerry Lawson" <[email protected]>
 > Does TypePad have any built-in anti-comment spam features?  I had been
> thinking about moving some existing blogs over there anyway.

Typepad has an IP banning feature, on which you manually add the IP's
(typepad provides IP with notice of each post) that supposedly should work
to prevent serial spanners. The spanners must be on to us though as I sure
pick up some spammers spamming my old blog on typepad that's still up.

> Movable Type ver. 3.0 is an interim version, for developers.  The 
> "mass consumption" ver. 3.0 is not available yet.
> Has anyone installed the third-party Movable Type plug-ins that Jeff 
> mentions, and if so, with what results?

We use MT for all our blog development for individual lawyers and law firms.
Though we have added some of our own features for other items, the comment
features that comes stock works pretty well. The user interface for the
backend comment feature is actually quite nice as well.

When someone comments, the browser screen will then let them know their
comment needs to be approved before it will be displayed. The blog publisher
then receives an email that there is a comment and a link to the backend
where they see a list of comments that are marked pending, approved or
banned. For subsequent comments, the blog publisher may then allow the
person's comments to flow through without approval, if the wish.

There is also a feature to approve 'commenters' in advance. This can work
well for a closed community for which people have to ask the blog publisher
to comment. This also works for some law firms, primarily large ones with
quality and assurance controls, who will publish legal news and updates and
then only allow the publishing law firm's lawyers to add comments. Comments
are closed to the public. Law marketing directors and managers find this
attractive so they need not teach lawyers in their firms to use the backend
of the blog publishing tool.

- Kevin
--
Kevin O¹Keefe
President, lexBlog, Inc.
mailto:kevin-fkW/[email protected]
--
The company: http://lexblog.com
The blog: http://kevin.lexblog.com
--







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