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Re: What is TXP and what will it be in the future?
Michael wrote:
It works!
Yes, constructive criticism works but unfair criticism has the opposite effect.
Textpattern is organic, you know, like a plant. Did you know that plants respond to love as well as water and sunshine? And txp is a unique plant. Who knows which way it will grow? We all know that one – it will grow towards the sun. But who knows what sort of flowers will grow on it? We’ve only seen the stem and the foliage so far. The flowers will be a delightful surprise! Do any of us really want to know what they will look like now? I don’t really think so because we will miss out on enjoying watching what they develop into.
Maybe many of the growing conditions of the web are similar to other software but Textpattern is developing in its own unique way. That’s the great thing about it! It isn’t being forcefed commercial fertiliser or split and replanted into little seed boxes or exploited by some management committee or company – it is growing naturally. If we let it, if we allow it water and sunshine, if we give it love, if we don’t stomp all over it with our big boots, it could well turn into the most beautiful plant or tree.
Whoops, sorry, getting carried away…
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Re: What is TXP and what will it be in the future?
Yes, constructive criticism works but unfair criticism has the opposite effect.
Hum. I read the article and in fact, it’s the same points that bothered me too and made me write my initial entry here:
If we need something, it’s
- robust comment spam detection and
- tagging.
That’s it. That’s all for the beginning.
I have another idea that could be easily implemented and bring people back to the system and also show them that TXP is alive: Why not have a tick-off list with most requested features and other issues visible to each and everyone on the TXP-website? (And every dozen ticked-off lines, you put a new release online…)
This would on the one hand make us see that something is going on (the DevBlog is not really eye-pleasing) and on the other hand it would be something like a timeline, but without dates. Perhaps – this would be the third benefit from such a list – by structuring this list, people could see into which direction the next dozen issues go… Just an idea (stolen from Blogger).
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Re: What is TXP and what will it be in the future?
- robust comment spam detection and
- tagging.
That surprises me because I never get any spam with 4.0.4, not a single one. I get plenty with previous versions, but I was under the impression that comment spam had been eliminated with 4.0.4.
And tagging – isn’t that possible with a plugin?
Seems to me like Drew was making a big fuss out of not very much.
The tick-off list might work, but who is going to do it?
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Re: What is TXP and what will it be in the future?
> robust comment spam detection
About 16 months ago, the first mass-comment spamming appeared. We tackled this relatively quickly by implementing an API that allows for easier development of anti-spam plugins (it was basically possible before, but it required more initiative and footwork). I also wrote posts on the weblog about it, I posted example-code from ery simple to quite complex, covering question-types, challenge repsonse mechanisms and how to tie it in with txp’s nonce system (with the captcha-plugin). I invited discussion and comments, I helped people that were interested and wanted to write a plugin. – The thing is that I got very little feedback, very few people seemed interested, from which I concluded that most people were doing fine. Later an Akismet-plugin was written by another plugin-developer.
In parallel with every maintenance release we also added minor techniques that make spammers life more difficult – but there is only so far you can go, before it starts affecting users as well. And at that point, it should be a user’s choice what he wants to do, and what he rather leaves out. Since all these things can be solved well with plugins, and plugins can react a lot quicker to changing circumstances, than we can with releases of textpattern (smaller codebase and userbase of a plugin means less testing is necessary and maintenance releases can happen quicker), the comment-spam issue – as far as the more invasive techniques go – is dealt with better by plugins than by core. The diversity of plugin-solutions also ensures that advances in bots never affect all textpattern-users.
Personally witha mixture of freely available plugins I have solved the comment-spam problem for me (despite lots of attempts everyday). I still have unimplemented ideas, should the situation someday (eager developers feel free to ask me, but I gues ideas are a dime a dozen and not really in short supply).
Of course we are not opposed to improve the core-techniques against comment-spam, far from it, we are constantly experimenting with different ideas – but comment spam is certainly not the problem you make it out to be. Just search the wiki for “comment spam” and should find an introductory documentation I wrote and a link to a few comments. I invite everyone to enhance the documentation, to post or request ideas for plugins etc. I am nt sure I undertand what the issue you have really is.
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Re: What is TXP and what will it be in the future?
Four days ago I got around a dozen e-mails that different people with various e-mail-addresses added comments to an article from the past. The comments were in German, in English and in Italian and even the URIs used for the spam-website were different, but in the end redirected to a spammers website. Even the IPs were different, so I could not block it.
Here is an example:
Name: cialis
E-Mail: tomas@theglobeandmail.com
Web:
Kommentar: Take care of it and keep it on the road!
<a href=“http://www.texastcm.edu/alumni/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=618 :: cialis”>cialis</a>
http://www.texastcm.edu/alumni/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=618 :: cialis
[url=http://www.texastcm.edu/alumni/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=618 :: cialis]cialis[/url]
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At this time, I did not moderate comments and they were open from the very first article to the last one. Now I “disabled comments after six weeks” and installed the plugin “mrw_spamkeywords_urlcount” and until yesterday nothing happened. Yesterday, when I looked into my comments-tab, I saw a huge amount (around 50) of comments like the one above submitted to TXP every thirty minutes, however it was held off by the plugin. As I asked before: I would not bother moderating first-time commenters by e-mail, later they could add comments without any moderation.
2Tagging is possible with a plugin, however it is no longer in development, because Ran Aroussi – as far as I can tell – stopped developing it. But the point is that categories are no longer interesting in sorting articles as sorting by date never was, too. So why not drop categories and use tags instead? You could help both: People, who want categories, just rename “tags” into “categories” and just use a hand full of them and the others – like me – could make use of many descriptive labels instead of just two.
The tick-off list should be moderated by the person who decides whether a feature is implemented and working or not. Who decides whether a release is a stable release? This guy should do it!
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Re: What is TXP and what will it be in the future?
tru_tags, successor to ran_tags.
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Re: What is TXP and what will it be in the future?
Michael wrote:
Yesterday, when I looked into my comments-tab, I saw a huge amount (around 50) of comments like the one above submitted to TXP every thirty minutes, however it was held off by the plugin. As I asked before: I would not bother moderating first-time commenters by e-mail, later they could add comments without any moderation.
In mrw_spamkeywords_urlcount you define the umber of links that are ok, and what should happen to comments that have more links (like, reload the comment form, mark as spam, send “Forbidden” and dont store the comment etc.). Since the plugin is only a handful of lines, which reads almost like pseudo-code, there is no UI, but the changes are made to the code (there’s some info in the wiki, and in a couple forum posts). This is far from perfect, but it’s certainly very, very easy for any interested plugin-developer to pick the issue, or that specific plugin up and improve on the situation.
You also have a plugin request (nice idea), which you could post in the appropiate forum, if you haven’t done so already.
Also: Have you read the wiki-page on comment-spam? Have you searched the weblog for posts on it? I understand you are unhappy with the state of things, but have you taken the initiative in understanding what is out there, before declaring the problem to be one of the “fundamental issues currently out there” – which is a perception that for the reasons explained I cannot quite share. Comment spam is not a one-shot problem, that is solved once and for all with a one-time effort (unless you are content with invasive features like captchas etc.). It’s an arms-race, and the community has all the tools available to tackle it, and for many users the available solutions work or work well enough. If there is enough need, further plugins are ported or developed. Do you prefer that core-developers to shift their effort from maintenance releases and core issues, towards anti-spam plugins? Like I said I have always offered my help to interested plugin developers that need help (read how mrw plugin came about). I am currently short on time (which is why I am not really here right now), but I’ll be back soon. Like I said, I do not understand why this appears to be made out to be an issue that was forsaken or forgotten, when the opposite is the case.
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Re: What is TXP and what will it be in the future?
Sencer wrote:
It’s an arms-race, and the community has all the tools available to tackle it, and for many users the available solutions work or work well enough.
It’s happening everywhere, we’re fighting spam on all fronts, blogs, forums, wikis, you name it. Anything that has a web interface and allows for user input is getting hammered.
On Textpattern, I have comment moderation on and I don’t have a spam problem to report. On my PunBB forums, I use an Akismet plugin and it’s working great, it’s catching all the guest spam.
We Love TXP . TXP Themes . TXP Tags . TXP Planet . TXP Make
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Re: What is TXP and what will it be in the future?
Concerning the entry by Mary on the TXP-blog:
- Sorry that I – an interested user – asked about TXP’s future.
- Sorry that I did not search the whole web to find out that perhaps somewhere in an answer to a previous question somebody from the developers posted an answer.
- Sorry that – as it seems – other interested users asked about TXP’s future.
- Sorry that we want to know what is going on. Perhaps we should stop asking and wait silently.
My point here is: Not only me, but also some of the commenters on the unfair criticism-article have the feeling that it is not allowed to ask about TXP’s future and if you do, you get answers that are on the borders of friendlyness and politeness in my eyes.
Not that I am being offended directly, but Mary’s statement “The following has already been stated quite frequently of late, but since the same people are still asking…” reads to me the same as if it said the idiots still did not get it… Perhaps everything here is more psychology than real work. Perhaps it is that english is not my mother language. Perhaps something else.
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#23 2007-05-16 09:10:46
- root
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- From: Manila, Philippines
- Registered: 2004-05-31
- Posts: 48
Re: What is TXP and what will it be in the future?
I think the reason we’re all so anxious about the continuity of this place isn’t because you aren’t doing enough—you’ve shown us more than enough evidence of the opposite—but because it’s so darn quiet. We’re not really sure where Textpattern is heading, ergo, we don’t know if it’s headed anywhere at all. I know you don’t want to feel obligated to bend to our every whim, but I think an enthusiastic (and visionary-ic) word now and then would help matters a lot.
:D
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