Spam Karma 2 Problem (Mit Antwort)

Ich hatte ja schon ein paar Vermutungen in der Vergangenheit geäußert, dass ich auf so einigen Blogs aus irgendwelchen Gründen in der Moderationsschleife mit meinen Kommentaren lande. Oder sogar durch irgendwelche widrigen Umstände als Spam gewertet werde.

Hier ist ein Beispiel dafür vom CW Notizblog, wie ich in deren Spam Karma 2 auftauchte (siehe Bild).

Daraufhin habe ich mich prompt mit einer E-Mail an den lieben Dr. Dave gewendet, der ja auch das SK2 konzipiert hat. Die Commenter Granularity fiel mir ja bisher auch nicht so positiv auf – hier bei uns im Blog und in allen von mir betreuten Blogs ist der Wert von mir bisher immer deaktiviert worden.

Dear Dr. Dave,

in the past I noticed that some of my comments are getting blocked by wordpress sites which use either akismet or sk2 or a combination of both.

However, this is a screenshot from one wordpress source which has a small misconfiguration in its sk2 settings. I believe the IP address is caught from the server-network itself since I know that my IP is usually being sent correctly.

Furthermore, while thinking of my own server, I noticed that the originally positive effects of using commenter granularity rather enabled spammers to use my domain/url or the url of other regular (and legal) commenters to receive a higher (positive) karma. Whenever they’ve been including my own domain/url or the ones of legal (and real) commenters, they were granted a supreme bonus from the granularity plugin. In order to fight them, I turned it off and can only advise you to either rethink the idea of using the granularity for benefits or simply disable it from the start in the initial settings – and only leave the option to enable it for advanced users.

What do you think?

Best regards
Mike Schnoor

Ich bin gespannt, wann und vor allen Dingen wie er antworten wird.

Nachtrag: Hier ist seine Antwort!

As for IP, there sometimes are issues due to the way PHP works across servers (many, many different configurations, resulting in sometimes inaccurate IPs and unfortunately little way to work around this without also offering backdoors to spammers).

You are right that as it is, granularity could theoretically be exploited by spammers… much as nearly every other blacklisting system. There’s practically no way to prevent spammers from poisoning a blacklist or assuming the identity of somebody else… However, you need to take in account that all this spam is automated and very generic: spammers do not tailor their spams for one single site, as would be required in order to use your URL when spamming your blog… Furthermore, granularity gives different weights to each parameter (IP, URL, email, positive, negative…), depending on their reliability and importance. The latest beta (http://www.wp-plugins.net/sk2/sk23_beta.zip) has brought some improvements too. And you can now add any domain you do *not* want used by either blacklists or granularity checks as a „greylist“ entry. For example, adding your own domain there will ensure no spammer can benefit from it.

Overall, I have some plans for major improvements over the way granularity (and a few other plugins) work… but unfortunately SK2 is only a side-hobby and I can only devote limited time to it, so this is progressing slowly… At any rate, I recommend checking the SK2 newsfeed (automatically displayed in your SK2 admin page) every once in a while for update notices.

Naja, immerhin ist jetzt das Problem einerseits dem Autoren von SK2 bewußt, andererseits hat er leider auch keine echte Abhilfe für den Fall, dass man als regulärer Kommentator recht häufig „geahndet“ wird. Mal sehen, wie es sich weiter entwickelt…