Troll Decimation Upgrade

Cool new Typepad feature:

Not only can I ban specific IP adresses and keywords from posting, but I can retroactiviely "Unpublish" all the posts from any specific Name, Email or IP Address.

I just banned a bunch of traffic trolls, spammers and other miscreants, but the most fun was eliminating almost a year’s worth of nonsensical troll postings from one jackass in particular: IP Address = 69.140.5.249.

I started sifting thru comments and found over 100 of these space wasting word spasms; 3 keystrokes and — bam! All of it "unpublished."

Back to the Yahoo Message Boards with you!

What’s so cool about this is that any troll/spammer/tool can waste 100 of hours writing this nonsense, and all that effort goes away in a blink of an eye.

Now if we can get Google and Blogger to ban the splogs, we’d be onto something . . .

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What's been said:

Discussions found on the web:
  1. S Brennan commented on Dec 24

    About time…of course this could be the first post going down the memory holeeeeeeeeeeeee…

  2. Cal commented on Dec 24

    69.140.5.249 PTR record: c-69-140-5-249.hsd1.va.comcast.net

    from DNSStuff.com, someone in Arlington, Va trolling it looks like

  3. MarkM commented on Dec 24

    Wow, is Kudlow that jealous of your success?

  4. K-Dawg commented on Dec 24

    BR,
    That’s what I kept saying last time. Even if you ban them, they can go through a proxy server. If you ban the proxy server IP, you ban all the people using that server. The trolls just move onto the next one which is easily configurable or even automatically through software. Some of these proxy servers come out of universities or even government offices.

    Some idea of the proxies out there :

    http://www.samair.ru/proxy/

    Registration to post may help some but easiest way is to just delete the posts outright. But then again it’s spending more time admin’ing the blog.

  5. Barry Ritholtz commented on Dec 24

    Yeah, you are right.

    But — Writing and posting comments takes alot more time than my asst spends flagging and deleting them. She drops 30 minutes a day eliminating several hours worth of other the creeps.

    Any suggestions beyond that? I’d love to do a registration process, if possible.

  6. ~ Nona commented on Dec 24

    Bill Cara requires pre-approval and registration before any posting by an individual is allowed. I can’t say I really like that, but I also understand why it’s useful/necessary. The requirement definitely eliminates trolls. What’s more, if a poster becomes abusive and rude even after registering — some people don’t know how to behave as guests in another person’s “home” as you know so well — Cara can easily ban him or her.

  7. HerbieS commented on Dec 24

    what’s with all this balmy weather in nyc in December. Kinda makes me want to go out for a jog in the park… nawwww too strenuous, i m going to eat some butter cookies instead and wait for the eagles cowboy game. go garcia go. happy holidays to all!

  8. RW commented on Dec 24

    BR,
    Bill Cara uses one of the independent registration entities, TypeKey, but there are others including a relatively new reg service from Google I believe. They aren’t really that much hassle from a user standpoint and since they can be used w/ multiple services and/or blog-sites a single registration can cover a lot of ground (depending on which sites one visits most of course).

    Registration does seem to cut through some potential problems from IP blocking and/or spam filtering.

    Blocking aside, the ability to retroactively ‘unpost’ a particular user is a cool feature.

  9. donna commented on Dec 24

    I moderate all comments from unknown names for the first post. But I don’t get that many “real” comments anyway. I use Akismet on WordPress for the spammers – have deleted over 30,000 spam comments this year.

    Spammers suck ass.

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