B. U. G. S.

Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You

Pardon this long comment; for our WIDE audience, I cannot be briefer. It’s in response to growing concern I’ve been made aware of here on the blog. I’ve included some historical data in order to answer THOSE questions as much as we can without knowing the programmers personally, or being able to know how they code logarithms used in nuking the spam-bots. All of us older folks need to keep in mind when dealing with the younger folks (16-29 year-olds) that they have been indocrinated by the best since birth and have parents that know no more unless they were able to be de-programmed. These younger people live and work and sleep with all races now and will react with instant censorship (which they completely and violently believe in due to Mommy Professor) when approached by anything but carefully constructed truth. IMHO. They have NO idea what the immigration policies are of this country let alone any other nation on earth. The tired old jew-thing is dead-on-arrival, unless their growing experience is raising the red flags but they just don’t know why.

When the blog anti-spam system known as Akismet “learns” it can only learn what a human being has made a decision on at the receiver end. For instance, if you decide ad-email from a place you’ve shopped at is spam, and mark it as such in your email program and “report” that, the system “learns” all of it whether it’s truly “spam” or not. Most ISPs have an employee that handles getting their domain name off the “Abuse” list because of stupid inane people who can’t remember their own names who then click-report whole spam boxes of email as spam and they’ve never looked at any of it.

If a blog comment is marked as spam by the moderators, there is “learning” that takes place. If the identical comment is put on MANY blogs at around the same time and they’re widely refused by moderators as spam, then the system “learns” what that is and puts it in the database so as to move it to the Spam Queue next time. If at this point it is then deleted from Akismet’s “spam” queue by those moderators, the database “learns” that it is truly “spam” to that blogger world.

Don’t put identical comments anywhere. You must interleaf points above and below so that the uniqueness keeps it off the database. Once a set of sentences and how they are punctuated, etc., makes it to a human who runs the database, who considers this a part of a “campaign” to spam blogs that the posters really don’t participate in, then that phrase will most likely make it to all the permanently banned database cross-references and be nuked before they ever are seen by a human again.

http://photomatt.net/ Homepage of Matt Mullenweg, programmer.
The primary founder of WordPress, a four-year-old project started when he was 19.
He also programmed Akismet, the best spam catcher plugin (a piece of code programming for the blog which you may choose to use or not) for all blogs which comes standard in blog software packages now.

Howdy. My name is Matthew Mullenweg. According to Google I am the #1 most important Matt in the world, but really I’m just a kid born and raised in Houston, Texas. I write code, prose, and music. I’ve taken a few pictures too.

I used to do consulting and go to school in Houston, then I moved to San Francisco where I worked at CNET Networks.

I left in late 2005 to found a new startup Automattic, which is the company behind WordPress.com, Akismet, and more to come.

Stopping Comment Spam. Who can? You have better things to do with your life than deal with the underbelly of the internet. Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again. How does Akismet work? http://akismet.com/faq/ . When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down. When you mark a comment as “spam” in the plugin or submit it using the submit-spam API call, the mistake is noted by Akismet and it learns from your submission. Don’t worry, if you see a regular comment on your Akismet page, just click the “Not Spam” checkbox and submit and the comment will be sent back to Akismet as a mistake. The system will learn from your submission, though it may take a day or so in some cases. False positives, as they’re called, are extremely rare and we watch them closely. [Read a real human being looks at it.] Akismet is the brainchild of Matt Mullenweg of WordPress and his merry band of Automattic rascal hackers. Well without giving too much of the secret sauce away, we can safely say that it would be pretty difficult to poison Akismet. We use dozens of factors to determine the spamminess of a submission, and we also have an identity attached to everyone using and contributing to the system, which allows us to do some interesting things with weighting and clustering activity. The name can be blamed on Matt’s sister, Charleen. Akismet is a contraction of Automattic Kismet. Our favorite definition of kismet is “Kismet (principle), the magnetic attractive force that actualizes the playing out of karma; often used in the positive sense.”

WordPress
I am the founding developer of WordPress, the blogging software that runs much of this site and thousands of other sites around the world. The website says WordPress is “a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform” but more importantly WordPress is a part of who I am. Like eating, breathing, music, I can’t not work on WordPress. The project touches a lot of people, something I’ve recently begun to appreciate. I consider myself very lucky to be able to work on something I love so much.

Meaningful Overnight Relationship

Filed under: press | May 10, 2007 2:19 pm | Author: Matt Mullenweg

One thing I’ve noticed about talking to certain types of press, particularly mainstream, is that they have a pattern in mind before they write about something, and the better you conform to the pattern the more coverage you get.

I think what they really want is an unusually young founder, possibly with a partner, who stumbled on an idea in an epiphany moment, implemented it in days, and then enjoyed overnight success, preferably capped with some sort of financial hook such as a huge VC funding or selling out to a large company for millions of dollars.

It’s not uncommon to get leading questions trying to hit a point in the above patterns… Yes, WordPress really is four years old. I was 19. No, I didn’t create it alone, if I did you would have never heard of it. Actually, it entered a rather crowded field, not even close to being first. No, not planning to sell it, there isn’t really anything to sell, it’s more of a movement. No, I didn’t make 60 million dollars in 18 months.

What’s worst is I think these stories sell a false promise and hope to people outside of the industry — it attracts the wrong type of entrepreneurs — and inside of the industry it distracts us from what really matters.

Someday I think there will be a realization that the real story is more exciting than the cookie-cutter founder myth the media tries frame everything in. It’s not just one or two guys hacking on something alone, it’s dozens of people from across the world coming together because of a shared passion. It’s not about selling out to a single company, it’s dozens of companies independently adopting and backing an open source platform for no reason other than its quality. I’m not a millionaire, and may never be, but there are now hundreds of people making their living using WordPress, and I expect that number to grow to tens of thousands. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning, not the prospect of becoming a feature on an internet behemoth’s checklist.

Finally it’s not Web 2.0, or another bandwagon me-too content management system with AJAX, it’s a mature project that has been around and grown up over four years of hard work, and it has many, many more years of hard work ahead of it. I smile these days when I see WordPress referred to as an “overnight success,” if only they knew how long an overnight success takes. photomatt.net/2007/05/10/meaningful-overnight-relationship

Oh my GOODNESS! I fell asleep 3 times. The cameras had to search around for faces that showed any reaction whatsoever. They’ve all heard that mantra so many times, the applause starters had to remind people when to react. I had to go back and catch the first 20 seconds.

From way back, rewind, replay, The Music Man: “OK men, The Minuet in G, think, think, THINK! Hear it in your mind… Laaah dee daaah, dee daaah, de daaah, de daaaaaaaaaah; La de daaah; la de daaah.” Just focus on the idea.