Finding Good Blogs in a Sea of Spam

The 16 free WordPress hosts I began in February have been a gigantic maintenance hassle because of spammer abuse, but they have lauched two cool new sites: The Ad Whisperers, a blog about TV commercials, and Political Fretwork, a liberal blog that mines the press for political news.

Last night, Ad Whisperers linked to a phone commercial that has an unusual selling point -- our company will stick with you through all the changes in your life -- even sexual orientation:

You may have seen the new Fido cellular phone ad touting how flexible the company's plans are. You may also have done a double-take near the end when you realized that the man -- who had first been seen making out with a blonde and then with a brunette and a baby -- was now snuggling up with a guy on the couch.

Forget low roaming charges and free calls to my five. I want a phone service that'll support me on the down low.

Fretwork pulls together stories from various sources as they're breaking, like this contrast between Bush's saber-rattling to pass a war budget without a withdrawal timetable and Mogtada al-Sadr's saber-rattling to end the occupation, noting a disturbing observation from Middle East scholar Juan Cole:

Chillingly, some of the demonstrators appeared to be soldiers in the Iraqi army.

If I could get one killer blog a month on these servers, it would be worth the aggravation of checking the WordPress MU servers daily to delete spammers.

Wordpressmu · Tv · Politics · 2007/04/20 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Comments

Question: I know it may not fit your situation, but does WP MU allow you to (easily) moderate / approve / deny new blog setup requests rather than having to go the other direction and monitor for spammers to delete?

Thanks.

#1 · Bryan · 2007/04/20

I don't think so, but I'm still looking for that functionality. I'm thinking about going to a model where blogs don't get to be indexed in Google or use ping services until I approve them. So a site that's set up just for spamming would never get that approval and be deleted after 60 or 90 days.

#2 · Rogers Cadenhead · 2007/04/20

There is this thread at the official forums:
mu.wordpress.org

Seems like the idea re: having all email confirmations go to the admin should be an easy hack. I haven't looked into it yet.

Bryan

#3 · Bryan · 2007/04/22