Show HN: Ursprung, a complete blog without a back end area
onli.github.io
onli.github.io
It is basically the same method used for email spam filters (though that are not always bayes filters anymore). Users mark comments as spam or ham, and when a new comment arrives you look at the words in it, calculate their spamminness rating using the bayes algorithm, and can then predict whether a comment is spam or not.
In blogs that works great. Ursprung combines that with a honeypot, a field hidden with css in the comment form that if filled out will dismiss the comment.
After reading about the Gmail spam protection I thought it was impossible to do anything against spam, because what Gmail does is not really possible to common people.
So I would like to know from you, that is much more experienced than I, what are my possibilities?
Also, isn't there a hosted service, SaaS or something, that offers filters and allow for feedback (users marking messages as spam), like a pay-as-you-go trained Bayes filter?
But you can run a filter yourself, and because your personal filter will be more adapted to the specific spam you get, the results can be suprisingly good. https://spamassassin.apache.org/ is one of the old ways of doing that, it should work fine for your scenario.
> Also, isn't there a hosted service, SaaS or something, that offers filters and allow for feedback (users marking messages as spam), like a pay-as-you-go trained Bayes filter?
Yes, tailored for blog-comments even. It is called akismet and run by Automattic, the company behind Wordpress, see https://akismet.com/. It is very effective and a good solution without costs if you are willing to give the comment data to an US-entity, which is very critical in Europe where I live. Though you can't train it yourself from outside of Wordpress, to my knowledge.
For mails there are several spam filter services, like http://www.mailroute.net/, but I do not have any experience with them.
It is designed for realtime testing of blog-comments as spam/ham. There are a lot of options, and it has been in use for a couple of years.
How do you protect yourself against spammers falsely classifying their comments as ham?
I'm not sure I want to integrate that for ursprung. So far, the local methods were enough (and the bayes filter easy to provide via a gem), if that changes for me or others I will reconsider. But serendipity (http://www.s9y.org/) should get a plugin for that. that is certainly used in places where more options would help. I'll look into it.
Spammers would need to train their comments as ham for every domain - since if bayasian testing is done it is done on a per-site basis. I think that's probably the biggest reason why they've not bothered.
Oh, I did not realize that. That at the same time is totally cool and will help to tailor the filter, and misses some potential by not having the global spam characteristics.
I added the plugin to my todo-list. Not having to force the user to bother with an Api-key alone is worth the effort.
It provides an API you can use to test if a blog-comment is spam or not.
Looks like a nice alternative to ghost.
I think I started before Ghost existed, but it went in a similar direction later on, possible that it influenced me. The big differences apart from the programming would be that there is no backend, that it is a way smaller project, that it has more features of a real blog at the same time (comments, trackbacks and pingbacks) while not having the cool editor.