In my continuing quest to block out comment spam, I made a tweak last week to my SQL scripts. Instead of doing a full-text match to a list of banned comment titles (among other filters), I started doing a keyword match. So if, say, you use the name of a certain drug that can help Bob Dole, then the comment would be automatically filtered out. Because this was a hack, I didn’t do anything fancy like put filtered comments into a table so that I can know if I’m filtering out legit comments.
Which, it appears, came back to bite me in the rear. When moving my list of banned stuff from “full text” to “keyword,” I failed to delete a banned comment title named “re:“. Since that automatically appears in the comment title when you post, that means that only comments that changed the title have been getting through for a week. It really *seemed* quiet around here, didn’t it? Alert reader David Totzke finally sent me an email through the Contact form saying “what’s up with this?” Which led me to the problem, which led me to the fix. Many thanks go to David! (And, in the future, anyone can use the Contact form to let me know if something isn’t working!)
I apologize to anyone whose comments have gotten incorrectly booted…
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