Monthly Archives: August 2007

Thank you Spam Karma 2

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If you have a wordpress blog, and have the usual comment spam issues, I’d recommend checking out Spam Karma 2.

I don’t get a lot of spam on my personal blog because I have comments automatically disable after a few days, however that’s not an option on the wishlisting blog, especially for technical posts that people sometimes stumble upon months later via Google.

Spam Karma is free on commercial blogs (unlike Akismet) and uses a number of cool tricks to figure out whether a post is coming from a legitimate person, including:

  1. How long they spent on the page before submitting a comment
  2. Whether or not they’re using an actual browser (javascript test)
  3. How many links are in the comment and the ratio of links to text
  4. A few other things

It then gives the post a “karma” score. If the karma score is too low (looks like spam) it will give the person a captcha so they have one last shot at proving they’re a human. It’s a pretty sweet idea. Rather than hitting everyone with a captcha, they just use it on particularly suspicious comments which is far less intrusive.

Posts with low karma and a failed captcha get marked as spam, and don’t end up in your moderation queue (although you can get a regular spam report).

The "how do you know…" field in Facebook

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In Facebook, when you’re defining the relationship you have with someone else, they ask the question:

“How do you know [Friend Name]?”

You can see an example of the options here (ignore the “skip this step” petition.)

The issue I have is that the question “how do you know…” is in the present tense, but the answers are all past tense. From the available answers, it makes it seem like the question you’re really being asked is “how did you meet [Friend Name]” which is different.

When I first started using Facebook, I interpreted the question as “how did you meet…” and then filled in the appropriate answer. For example, I met Adam W. through Fil so I filled that in. The problem is, now when I look at my friends list, it says “You know Adam through Fil.” I consider Adam a friend, and this reads like he’s just a friend-of-a-friend.

So, I’ve basically taken to not filling in the relationship details in these cases, because I feel like it sends the message “we’re not really friends, we just know each other through a mutual person.” All of that could be avoided if they just changed the presentation/grammar. Has anyone else had the same problem, or am I overanalyzing Facebook?