[UCIMC-Tech] Friggin' Spam Filter, etc

[Mike Lehman]

Well, I will say that the spam filter is doing a great job of keeping 
spam out from what can be seen.

On the other hand, in simply managing a number of housekeeping tasks, 
I've found it pretty irritating. In fact, maybe we should re-term it the 
"publishing filter," because from my experience it seems to spend a lot 
of time preventing legitimate usage of the site.

Right now, I used Norman Solomon's great piece on Bob McChesney's new 
book for the daily test feed. There's a great commentary by Free Press's 
Craig Aaron that goes with it, sort of, but trying to post it as a 
Comment tells me it's triggered the spam filter. Didn't seem appropriate 
to roll it in with the article itself and doesn't seem right to add it 
as another article when we only have three stories visible on the main 
page for non-Local news anyway (another issue I find baffling, given no 
one ever documented why that change was made, as well as Comments 
disappearing.).

And it seems ridiculous to have the spam filter enabled for logged in 
users in the first place. We've had virtually no problems ever with 
registered users from the beginning of the site. If we ever do, that's 
what editors are for. Maybe it's an architecture issue that can't be 
fixed? In any case, the machine is telling humans what to do, instead of 
the other way around it should be.

Don't mean to dump water on anything, but I will agree with Chris's 
assessment that the site is working better in terms of security, but I 
think we need to keep in mind that in terms of making it friendly to 
folks to publish, it's been a serious retrograde. View counts tell some 
of the story of this decline. In fact, no one can even register as a new 
user right now. Even assuming we make a decision to drop open publishing 
(and I presume drop our status as an IMC), I assume we still want people 
to use the site. But making a decision to not allow new users, which is 
what we've effectively done -- if not officially, means we want to tell 
citizen journalists to go somewhere else to publish...and it shows.

I know there was some talk about a meeting to discuss these and other 
subjects. so I'm hoping we'll get to that soon and maybe get some of the 
easier issues sorted out, because we're letting our 
political-journalistic capital trickle away while things are in Limbo 
like this.
Mike Lehman