The word from Typepad is that I need to help “train” their new spam filter, by which they mean using their new tool that allows me to surf through everything the filter flags as spam, selecting all of the legitimate comments and republishing them while confirming the spamminess of all the actual spam and deleting those comments, screen by screen.
TypePad also reminded me that TPS reports now need to use the standard cover sheet. Apparently there was a memo.
The manual “training” of the spam filter, on this end, is very similar to the process of not having a spam filter at all. That’s frustrating, but probably not as frustrating as how it looks on your end — with loads of comments still being blocked more or less at random. I’ve been doing this “training” for the past 12 hours or so, and the filter is still flagging legitimate comments twice as often as it’s capturing spam. And it’s still not capturing all the spam. And, because the filter-editing tool is somewhat clumsy and sluggish, I think I may have accidentally ordered several shipments of generic cialis and opened an account at an offshore paypal casino.
And, most annoying of all, the filter editing tool only has two options: republish as legitimate or delete as spam. Thus “training” the filter requires that I force-publish all of the legitimate comments, lest the filter be accidentally “trained” to start rejecting them. The upshot there, as you’ve probably noticed, is lots of double- and triple-posts, which I’ll try to go into the non-spam-comment editing tool and winnow out.
When I e-mailed TypePad to tell them that this “training the filter” process didn’t seem to be working — that, in fact, the filter was still blocking comments at a rate of 68-percent legit/32-percent spam — their response was “Train harder.”
Since this is Thursday, I should note the almost theological response we humans have to this kind of arbitrary system. We look for meaning and, if it cannot be found, we impose meaning. On my end, this produces something like the behavior one sees in a person who believes in the mechanical/magical efficacy of prayer (it’s not doing anything — I’ll do it more and do it harder). The multitude of comments trapped in the filter, meanwhile, seem to be rehashing the dialogues of the book of Job, with several taking the Eliphaz/Bildad approach (I’m being punished, I must have sinned) and others following the counsel of Job’s wife (curse TypePad and die). No one has yet taken the proto-Calvinist approach of young Elihu, arguing that all of our comments deserve to be deleted as spam and that if TypePad graciously allows some elect few to be published we ought to respond only with gratitude. Theology was once regarded as the Queen of the Sciences. If that strikes you as inappropriate, consider the theological scientific method at work in response to the seemingly arbitrary blocking of comments. We hypothesize that there is a reason or a meaning for why a given comment is blocked, and we experiment by resubmitting it with variations in an attempt to discern what those reasons and that meaning might be. Not the sort of thing one can measure with calipers, yet not wholly unscientific either.
On a normal Thursday, I’d expect the above rambling musing to prompt an entertaining flame-war here in comments. It probably still will, but thanks to the upgrade to TypePad Vista, those comments will be blocked, buffered, and force-published later in quadruplicate.
I apologize, again, for the inconvenience.
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