MT-Blacklist Blocking Valid Comments?

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If anyone has tried posting a comment here, and received a message indicating that his comment was being blocked “due to questionable content”, please email me. Include, if possible, the text of the comment that caused problems. I don’t know whether false positives are a big issue for MT-Blacklist, but I was just blocked from commenting on another blog, and I don’t know why, and I wonder if we are inadvertently blocking some legitimate comments here.

I apologize for any inconvenience if we blocked your comment.

8 thoughts on “MT-Blacklist Blocking Valid Comments?”

  1. It wasn’t your comment, Jonathan. It’s you. Hey, I have standards to maintain.

    (Seriously, will try to figure out if Blacklist has some kind of “whitelist” function. It ought to.)

  2. you can modify the outgoing error message the blacklist gives when it bounces comments.

    find the main blacklist page, yourMTdirectory/mt-blacklist.cgi, and go to the configure section. near the top of the page is a section that asks you to define the error message response. the default setting should tell a commenter what part of their comment got bounced, ex: their text contained a word that blacklist didn’t like, so they can delete it from their post.

    as for a whitelist function, i haven’t found any. but, unless a commenter’s url, email, or IP matches a known spammer, i don’t think false positives are common. unless, you have been adding key words or phrases to your master blacklist.

  3. Moira, I’m skeptical that a whitelist wouldn’t soon be exploited by spammers, using the equivalent of password-cracking programs.

    seed, thanks. When I installed MT-Blacklist I tried to configure it as you suggest, but I didn’t succeed. I’ll try again.

  4. I haven’t had any problems here, but I know that the blacklist at Tim Blair’s has the damnedest objections — to the word “roadside”, on one occasion. I figure that the software just gets cranky from time to time.

  7. You’ll be happy to know that MT-Blacklist v2.0 (of which there is currently an emergency release for MT 3.0x users) in conjunction with MT 3.1 will make it much easier to “block” spam without dealing with the possibility of false positives. Also, the log is MUCH improved and gives you a hell of a lot more diagnostic data, so that you essentially will know for sure that what you’ve blocked is actually spam and recourse to address it if it was not.

    I’ll go into these details more when I release the final version.

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