The Problem of False Positives When Trying to Protect Your Website From Spam Comments on a WordPress Site

I've been running Dangerous Intersection since 2006, which now offers more than 7,000 posts.  When you are not running your own website, there are a lot of things that you need not worry about.  Technical issues often arise, and I've been doing my own tech work on my site.  That sometimes means I need to spend significant time to figure out why a Wordpress configuration, a widget or a plugin isn't working correctly. DI has generated a lot of comments over the years, almost 30,000 comments to date. It occurred to me today that there haven't been any comments for weeks.  I carefully analyzed my WordPress setup and could not see any problem.  No issues, which is typical of Wordpress, which is an amazing (and free) website platform.

Then I moved to my anti-spam protection plugin, Askimet, which has done a great job over the years.  But not anymore.  Recently, Askimet has been improperly identifying ALL of my incoming comments (even my own comments) as spam.  I tried to figure out how to reconfigure, but couldn't.  I have no intention of scanning thousands of spam comments each day (many millions of spam comments over the years) in order to identify the real comments, manually pulling them out of the "spam" folder. Thus, I thought, "Maybe it's time for a new form of comment spam protection."

I did some research and decided to install CleanTalk Anti-Spam, a comprehensive program with a delightfully easy installation.  There is no Captcha involved.  I don't quite understand how they do it, but it CleanTalk is a wonderful system with rave reviews on Wordpress and more than 430,000 installations.  I'm not getting paid anything for recommending CleanTalk.  I am writing this with the hope that others who are frustrated with the deluge of spam comments that you get when you run a blog will appreciate this option.

I've been testing out CleanTalk for the past fifteen minutes and it's working like a charm.  CleanTalk is free for one year, then costs $8/year, which is more than reasonable, given how well the program works. I have no problem paying low prices for excellent services that will save me many hours over the year.

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Need to Up My Game on Photoshop

I've dabbled with Photoshop over the years, but I have decided to (as Stephen Covey suggested) "sharpen the saw."  In other words, I want to incorporate new tools so that I can get things done better and more efficiently when I use Photoshop.  Shane Parrish of Farnham Street would identify this as "Compounding," which is a really cool concept, especially when applied to things other than earning interest on money.

And what a better time to learn tips on using photoshop than modern times, when you can attend Youtube University or pay a bit from many other online instructors?  I've already incorporated one change when compositing, something I should have done years ago: Instead of trimming a the top image with the eraser tool, I've started making use of layer masks.  That, and use of the "x" key to switch colors from black to white (black conceals, white reveals), has made it a joy to display only what I want on the top layer.  Whenever you make a mistake, it's non-destructive and hitting the "x" key lets you bring back what you accidentally took away.  What you'll see below is an image I created using the layer mask to display precisely what I wanted in my own body (I'm the guy on top).   I'll paste in the FB commentary so you can experience the joke too:

Last night I spotted my buddy Eddie White at the Southside YMCA. Eddie is active duty U.S. Army and I think his military exercise routine requires him to bench press a house. I was happy to serve as his weight-lifting partner.





My body looks pretty tidy, but it took a long time (about 45 min) to get it looking good. I kept zooming in deep to make the cuts precisely and I was using a mouse. My next step in my education is to learn to use the Wacom Intuos Wireless Graphics Drawing Tablet that I just purchased. There's going to be a learning curve, but I've seen a lot of testimonials from people who learn it and love it so much that you couldn't take it back unless you pried it out of their cold dead hands. So that's my next step in my education, my quest to do more than simply "dabble" with Photoshop.

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WTSocial: Alternative to Facebook is Announced by Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia



Jimmy Wales' (founder of Wikipedia) has a new project, WTSocial  

I'm going to presumptively speak for "the World" here:  The World is ready for an alternative social gathering spot that respects users' privacy, discourages acrimony and tamps down hard on misinformation. I'm an early financial supporter because I really want this project to take off. This will be a fundamentally different business model than Facebook in that it will be funded through user donations. Here's are a few excerpts from a Financial Times article about WTSocial:

“It won’t be massively profitable but it will be sustainable,” [Wales] said . . . Wales said he believes the time is now right for a new venue that is free from what he calls “clickbait nonsense”. “People are feeling fed up with all the junk that’s around,” Mr Wales said.

Regarding his goals for numbers of users, Wale stated: “Obviously the ambition is not 50,000 or 500,000 but 50m and 500m.”

Photo Credit:  Photograph: ed g2s - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15707

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