Here's a joke for ya.
- What's the difference between Baptists and Methodists?
Methodists greet each other in the liquor store.
Neither Baptists nor Methodists are supposed to drink alcohol, you see, but the joke is that Methodists at least aren't hypocrites.
The reason I'm telling this joke is that a couple of weeks ago I went to a Food & Wine Festival which featured alcohol in the form of wine and beer. Just after I walked in the door, a woman passing by me noticed the cross-and-flame around my neck and said, You must be a Methodist!
I admitted that I was, and she said, I am too!
So you see, the joke is true.
Stephen says:
Methodists aren't supposed to drink? I grew up Methodist and never knew that. Of course, it was a dry county and I was under-age, so maybe no one thought it important to tell me.
Of course, now I'm a bottle-carrying agnostic. No worries.
Laurabelle says:
No one seems to make a big deal about it, but the communion is really grape juice, right? There you go. As the joke implies, most people still drink. I don't think it's a sin.
Sorry your comment was marked as spam, by the way. I don't know why. If it makes you feel any better, it seems like most of my comments get marked as spam these days, and I have to go whack my filter upside the head. On the other hand, I got another spam for male member enhancement today, and the filter caught that (first one, woohoo!).
Stephen says:
Oh, yeah. I had almost forgotten about the grape juice. To this day, because of my conditioning, I love drinking grape juice while eating crackers.
I noticed your filter had caught my message. I figured you'd get around to fixing it.
It had never happened to me before, but I got comment spammed twice last weekend. Like a dozen or so at a rate of one per minute. I thought about doing the filter thing, but the links were surrounded by innocuous text and each link was for a different thing. (Basically, they were trying to up their Google score-- which in my case would have failed, as I'm meta-tagged to keep search engines out of my comments). I didn't like the look of the learning curve for filtering that kind of spam. Instead, I opted to upgrade MT to a version that has throttling, and set the throttle seconds to 92. I've since had to delete the occasional comment spam, but don't have to delete multiple postings from the same place.
Laurabelle says:
We always had bread, not crackers. I remember my mother making rye bread for communion occasionally, for people who were allergic to wheat.
I have throttling too (notice the bottom of the sidebar on the front page, which lists the add-ons and modifications to MovableType), but I use filtering too. You're right that there's a learning curve, but the curve would be significantly less if I had more spam to feed to it. For example, when I started using a Bayesian email filter, I already had a corpus of spam to feed to it. Thereafter, the filter trains itself on the new items that come in. I just don't get enough spam on this here blog for the filter to learn very fast.
The odd thing is that for the first while, the filter was marking everything as 50% spam probability, and nothing got blocked. Now it seems to be erring on the other side, and while some comments (like all of Dorothea's, I think) were assigned 0% probability, most of mine are 99% probable spam. Strange, but I think it'll probably get ironed out somehow.
The thing with Bayesian filters is, the more different your spam is from the legitimate stuff, the more accurate the filter. I guess my corpuses just aren't different enough.