Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to announce that my blog has acquired its first critic. According to this enlightened individual, I am a F***ING MORON!!
, Jeff is a FAT F***IN PIG AND HE IS ALSO A MORON!!!
, and my rotten Mondays are all my fault because (you guessed it) I am a f***in moron!!!!
(I guess he felt he was hitting the caps lock a bit too hard by the third comment.)
Apologies for quoting this troll, but really, I just had to laugh.
Mr. Moron, I suggest you expand your vocabulary if you would like your comments to pass my trained Bayesian filter.
Truck says:
Confidential to the Moron: Yo' Mama.
Stephen says:
"Trained Bayesian filter"? I'm not familiar with that breed. I met a trained border collie, once.
Seriously, though: You mentioned this once before, I think. Where did you get it?
Laurabelle says:
My Bayesian filter was written by James Seng and published on his blog. (The URL is also on the sidebar of my index page and in any entry that has been identified as spam by the filter.) The filter works on both comments and pings.
Bayesian filters are everywhere. My favorite Bayesian filter for email is ifile. It's brilliant. The Bayesian algorithm sorts text objects by similarity to other objects that are in certain categories. It does this by calculating probabilities of whether each token (generally a word) has a higher probability of being in one category or another. The combination of all these probabilities is used to calculate the total probability for the text. Now, of course it gets it wrong sometimes, which is why Bayesian implementations incorporate learning (what I called training). I told my filter that those three comments were spam, and now any comment with the word is likely to be filtered out.
The downside to Bayesian filtering is that it needs a certain amount of training to be effective. This was easy for email; I had my corpus of non-spam email plus a small corpus of spam with which I did the initial training, and ifile learned from incoming email, both automatically and manually (when it misfiled something, I'd retrain it on that email). Unfortunately, I had no corpus of spammish comments to train the comment filter on, so these were the first.
This all is why I suggested the Moron expand his vocabulary.
Maggie says:
Amused that you assume your critic to be male :-) MHC has trained you well.
I saw the comment before your bayesian filter eliminated it, and.. well, I wasn't laughing. Raises the question of when it is appropriate to acknowledge one's critics, and when to just say, "deleted!" triumphantly to oneself.
Me? I wouldn't honour such incendiary remarks with a reply.
Laurabelle says:
Well, the style of comment seemed particularly male. I should hope that any female would at least have a little more originality.
I think I actually would have been more hurt if the Moron had left only one comment, but the fact that there were three with almost exactly the same wording made the whole thing quite ludicrous. It's not incendiary at all, just dumb. I've seen enough on the Net to recognize a troll when I see one, and this one isn't even very good.
One of the first rules of Usenet is, of course, Don't Feed The Trolls. The reason I posted about the Moron one was that this is the first occasion I've ever had to use my filter, so it's quite a novelty. Besides, I don't see my post as honoring the troll with a reply. The Moron wanted me to be upset, and I'm not. It's been a complete failure on his part. (He must be so disappointed.)
Ai Ling says:
*chuckling* I'm sure he is. Why is it you're not getting the weird spam comments I do? I usually catch them because I only have a readership of . . . hrm, better not embarass myself by saying it, but it's low. :) That, and I update about every two seconds. ;)
Laurabelle says:
For curiosity's sake, yesterday I took a peek at my Apache server logs for February 17 and checked out the Moron's trail through my site. (Yes, I can do this if I want to, the information is there, but don't get too paranoid.) It turns out that he hit one of my most popular entries because of a Yahoo! search and attempted to reply to my comment which said I was closing comments on that entry because of all the idiots who were using it to advertise their begging sites. You might think he'd realize that since I said I'd disabled comments, it wouldn't work.
On the other hand, I am a bit of a moron for not being able to get the comment-form links not to display when comments are closed. But if that were the problem, he should have just said.