Comment Fail

If you’ve tried to leave comments here recently, bless you, and I’m sorry.

First, the WP-OpenID plugin for one specific version (2.2.0) had a bug which ate comments containing double quotes, which means all comments with links in them. 2.2.1 fixes the problem.

Then, Luis Villa told me in email that the Captcha on my site was unusable. So I tried it, and he’s right.

A while back I installed a plugin for Mollom, which catches comments which are thought to be suspicious in one way or another, and then asks users to solve a captcha. Problem is that they were all unsolvable.

Or, rather, they were perfectly solvable, and I solved them - as I’m sure Luis had. But Mollom refuses to recognize my solutions. Maybe I really am a computer, and thus fail the Captcha.

Anyway, the point is, I’m not trying to make it difficult to comment on this blog, just trying to deal with spam. I’ve turned Mollom off again, and won’t re-enable it until I try it myself and see that it works.

On the Internet, People Know if you’re a dog

(Update, 2pm ET: Scott Hintz from TripIt replied in the comments on the original post apologizing for the employee’s behavior - thanks Scott.)

One of the famous cartoons of the first internet craze was this one from the New Yorker:

On the Internet Nobody Knows You're a Dog

The reality is, however, that increasingly people’s online identity can be mapped to their offline identity. (Check out Who Controls the Internet? for a well informed and very smart extended exploration on what this means from a legal perspective, and this reality checkfrom UNC).

Earlier this week, I wrote a blog post about TripIt and Dopplr, two major companies in the social travel market, which people use to share information about various trips they are taking or planning. It was a perfectly innocuous post, describing some of Dopplr’s new features which make it more like TripIt, and presumably more competitive with TripIt as a result.

That post recieved the following comment, from someone identifying himself as Thomas, with an email address at Yahoo! mail, and no url:

Well, in regards to Dopplr’s generic email import approach, I’ve tried forwarding several different emails I have from my company, travel agent, and from major airlines such as American Airlines, but they don’t work one bit. For example, Dopplr thinks I’m going to different places in Europe when I send in my opentable reservation.

In contrast, most of these work “out of the box” with TripIt. And when I complained about my travel agent not being supported, they added it within a day.

What’s more, is that I don’t really want to “discover” people I do not know on a trip. All I’ve been wanting to do is to manage my business travels better and inform my family. TripIt fits that bill perfectly.

So, I don’t really find Dopplr very useful. My two cents.

Thanks for the nice write-up though.

Best,
Thomas

Not itself a controversial comment, and I almost approved it without a second thought. But then I noticed that the IP address from which the comment was posted (69.12.150.246) is mapped to a machine called wall.tripitinc.com:

jeckman$ nslookup 69.12.150.246

Non-authoritative answer:
246.150.12.69.in-addr.arpa name = wall.tripitinc.com.

(I would likely not have even noticed, but either WordPress itself or one of my plugins actually adds that info to the email it sends me letting me know that a comment has been recieved and is awaiting moderation).

So I emailed “Thomas” - using the yahoo.com address he provided - and suggested he disclose that in his comment.

I never heard back - perhaps the email wasn’t valid to begin with. So, I decided to post the comment, but also note what I had determined about its origin.

Lesson learned? It’s easier than you think to determine who you are when you do various things on the net. If you’re going to post comments on blogs that discussion your product(s), disclose your relationships. Nothing wrong with posting - I’ve had many comments from folks whose products/services I discuss in blog posts - but posting a comment like the above without disclosure is basically astroturfing, and it never works.

Mollom anti-spam

I’ve enabled Mollom-based anti-spam to this blog - please let me know if this causes any unexpected difficulty or errors.

Mollom will ask “suspicious” commenters to solve a CAPTCHA before allowing their comments to post.

If this proves too onerous I will go back to just using Askimet but I wanted to try it out.

Thanks to Dries, Benjamin, et al for running Mollom and to Matthias Vandermaesen for maintaining the WP-Mollom plugin.

WordPress to Facebook and Back Again

I was really intrigued by Dave Lester’s WPBook plugin, which lets you bring posts from your wordpress blog into an application in Facebook.

I really wanted, though, for users to be able to comment on blog posts from inside Facebook, with their Facebook identities, and have it work like the OpenID comment plugin (in the sense that the user should not need to provide any authentication info, but it should be derived from their Facebook login).

I think I’ve finally got it it nailed, at least to the point where folks can start testing it.

If you are a Facebook user, go to this application page: http://apps.facebook.com/openparenthesis/

It will require you to log in (or already be logged in) to Facebook, but you don’t have to add the application to your profile or spam all your friends.

What you’ll see is my five most recent blog posts from this blog, inside a Facebook wrapper. (Can’t include embedded videos, the styles are bit wonked, etc - but it is a start. This is basically just Dave Lester’s plugin).

You should also (this is the new part I’ve hacked in) see the ability to comment on posts - without being asked for a name or url or email address.

Please leave me a comment to test it out. It should, if all works according to plan, pull your Facebook profile pic as your avatar for the comment as well - since your facebook profile page is actually an hCard with appropriate markup (go microformats!).

I believe this will work even for folks who are not “friends” of mine in facebook - but let me know if you run into difficulty.

Once I’ve validated that it works I’ll publish the code. It required me to add at least one file to my theme, and relies on the hAvatar plugin to get the profile pic.

Known Issues:

Sometimes the “autoresize iFrame to content size” bit in Facebook fails, and you end up with a fixed size view into longer content, with no scrollbars. Haven’t figured out what triggers that yet - standard facebook javascript api.

Sometimes you’ll get the “You’re entering comments too fast” error - just wait 30 seconds. Unless lots of people are all trying to do it from facebook at once this should go away. I’ll need to figure out how to unthrottle the comment queue in wordpress for this point.

WordPress Avatar Plugin, Movable Type Action Stream Plugins

Finally got around to publishing out (see Code) some things I’ve been tinkering with. Nothing major, but hopefully someone will find some of them useful.

For Wordpress, check out MBLA+, which is an avatar plugin (shows people’s avatars in comments) based on MBLA and hAvatar. I’ve been using it here and on Goatless for a while, and think I’ve got most of the kinks out, though it should still be considered beta at this point.

For Movable Type, check out Action Stream plugins for Amazon wishlists, Last.fm recent tracks, meetup profile, and a generic YourBlog template. I’ve been using these (with MTOS 4.1) over at JohnEckman.com.

I’m also working on a Twitter application using the API to turn a twitter account into a group. (All tweets by followers to a given account beginning with a specific preface get re-tweeted so that all other followers see them). Hope to have that done in time to be useful for VegSXSW (twitter).