meta-roj

behold, the power of the commons… even on my tiny scale here.

in a comment here, José G. Moya has translated the license into spanish, here.

thanks, jose… use it well. so far i’ve had mixed success enforcing it.

i’ve put up a new commercial applications license, effective today.

just a minor upgrade, but i’ve decided that the definition of “blogspam” should be expanded to include people that provide false information, including those using my resources to make it appear as though someone else had posted something.

anyone following the blogspam saga knows that my email address has been spread around guestbooks as a result of my efforts, so i wanted to close that loophole in this space. if you can’t be polite and you can’t be honest about the source of the comments, you can take your comments elsewhere.

unlike some places, dissent is welcome here – even encouraged. but you don’t get to [ab]use my time and resources and hide behind someone else’s name.

the license itself, and any variation of it, are, of course, free to use and modify as defined in the attached creative commons license. in fact, i may have an interesting story about someone who has done just that, only they didn’t quite follow the spirit of the license.

You are a guest on this server. I fund the operation and maintenance of this website, weblog and domain. I welcome, without obligation, comments and thoughts that are intelligible, relevant, and written by humans in response to posts or existing comments on this site.

On the other hand material posted here that is not relevant to the referenced post or existing comments, incoherent, automated, that is copied to several other servers and that includes links or other references to websites that offer products or services for sale are subject to this contract:

By pressing the “Post” button on any comment form on this site or by invoking any mechanism that causes a comment or trackback to appear on this server, you accept this contract with these binding terms:

1. Your commercial material will be reviewed for a $150 reading fee per comment or trackback.
2. You agree to be subject to the laws of Maryland, United States of America for the purpose of enforcing this contract.
3. You agree to pay any and all costs, including, but not limited to, court and attorney fees, incurred in enforcing this contract.
4. You agree to pay your obligation under this contract within 15 days by forwarding a check, payable in US funds to:
Roger Wood
Rojisan.com Reading Fees
PO Box 5534
Laurel MD, 20726 USA
5. You agree to accept all costs associated with closing your obligation under this contract, including any researchers, investigators and collections agents hired by me.
6. You agree that the operator of the source computer and any commercial enterprises mentioned in or linked from the posted material will be held jointly responsible for all obligations of this contract.
7. You agree to waive any rights or expectations of privacy regarding the source computer, its operator(s) and any persons or commercial entities mentioned in or linked from the posted material, including correspondence in any medium.
8. Acceptance of this contract and payment of obligations under this contract does not, in any way, guarantee that your material will be visible to the public. All material on this blog is present at my sole discretion.

This license is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

(If you have suggestions for improving this license, please let me know. If you wish to comment on this license, you may do so here)

[this is a draft – send me your thoughts]

You are a guest on this server. I fund the operation and maintenance of this website, weblog and domain. I welcome, without obligation, comments and thoughts that are intelligible, relevant, and written by humans in response to posts or existing comments on this site.

On the other hand material posted here that is not relevant to the referenced post or existing comments, incoherent, automated, that is copied to several other servers and that includes links or other references to websites that offer products or services for sale are subject to this contract:

By pressing the “Post” button on any comment form on this site or by invoking any mechanism that causes a comment or trackback to appear on this server, you accept this contract with these binding terms:

1. Your commercial material will be reviewed for a $150 reading fee per comment or trackback.
2. You agree to be subject to the laws of Maryland, United States of America for the purpose of enforcing this contract.
3. You agree to pay any and all costs, including, but not limited to, court and attorney fees, incurred in enforcing this contract.
4. You agree to pay your obligation under this contract within 15 days by forwarding a check, payable in US funds to:
Rojisan.com Reading Fees
PO Box 5534
Laurel MD, 20726 USA
5. You agree to accept all costs associated with closing your obligation under this contract, including any researchers, investigators and collections agents hired by me.
6. You agree that the operator of the source computer and any commercial enterprises mentioned in or linked from the posted material will be held jointly responsible for all obligations of this contract.
7. You agree to waive any rights or expectations of privacy regarding the source computer, its operator(s) and any persons or commercial entities mentioned in or linked from the posted material, including correspondence in any medium util all obligations of this contract are met.
8. Acceptance of this contract and payment of obligations under this contract does not, in any way, guarantee that your material will be visible to the public. All material on this blog is present at my sole discretion.

thanks: jsled, loebrich, bill kearney.

I have recently been informed that “there is no legal ground (that I am aware of) on which you can stand with your payment requests.”

so, while i appreciate the votes of support and sincere thoughts from kynn, richard, matthew, kriselda, geekman, amy, pieter, chris and others, who have shared their thoughts in backchannels…. now i have a bit of a crisis for this theory of imposing cost on blogspammers.

my service provider received a complaint about my thank-you note and payment request to a spammer, and as a result, i’ve been asked to stop emailing people requesting payment, with the above justification.

so, i’m calling any lawyers within eye-shot of this post – help me craft functional, legal, and binding commercial applications license terms.

i think there are grounds here. i’m providing a service (hosting, storage, bandwidth, professional editorial review, and a prominent posting place), and in return demanding a fee. there should be a nice, simple way to explain that i expect payment for the services provided. i think there is probably a solid precedent for collecting fees for services.

i knew this was a quick hack, and full of holes, but i guess it’s time to get serious. if one complaint from a spammer is enough to shut down this experiment, the spammers have already won. ladies and gentlemen, pack up your blogs and go home.

yeah, i can get with this.

i just felt like giving a little nod to someone who has recently created some very nice bits of code.

a small plague of comment-spam (and a threat of trackback spam) has been getting a lot of discussion lately. one of the participants, james seng, got beyond the talk and wrote some code, and has not one, but two comment-spam tools available for movable type. neither is a universal solution, but both are great little bits of code. first is a turing test screen. second is a bayesian filter.

now, for the meta-roj blog, comment spam is a minor problem at best. there are certain advantages to having only a few readers :). i’ve implemented a cost-imposition concept here. if i actually end up spending time cleaning out blog spam, you can bet i’ll be looking at his solutions.

Commercial interests posting material anywhere on this blog or website are subject to the following terms: Comments posted on this blog that are unrelated to the original post or existing comments and that include links or references to commercial sites will be charged US$150 per comment, payable within 30 days. Interest will accrue at a rate of 1.5% per month until paid in full. Balances remaining due more than 120 days will be forwarded to a collection agent. The posting individual and any commercial enterprises mentioned in the comment will be held jointly responsible for all fees and all expenses related to successfully closing open accounts, including, but not limited to, investigative and collection services.

Payment of these fees does not guarantee that your comments will remain visible to the public. All material on this blog is present at my sole discretion.

update: Revised version is here

some time ago, this blog was “tagged” by the now-becoming-infamous comment-spam-from-china.

some people blocked the ip within movabletype, some found interesting old techniques for stopping the non-humans. i apparently took a different approach than most people, blocking the entire network containing the offending source ip from “post” operations anywhere on the server. this was a bit of a snap decision, but since i had only two incidents to work with, and only one ip, i figured “read but no posting” from the nice people in tianjin provice was the least offensive solution in the short term. if anyone over there really wants to get in touch with me, well. i’m not hard to find.

i also contacted the host of the site that some of the blog-spam links (the site that got dumped in this blog), but it seems to be still up and functional (so much for abuse contacts).

since then joi‘s had several more spam-comments show up, and the informal survey of offenses to date suggests they are all coming from the same network in china.

anyway, this is turning into an interesting new phenomenon. some time ago, i posted this approach i thought might be interesting to solve a less-obvious and less-intrusive “bad behavior.” i wonder if there’s a way to extend some form of this concept to the well-inter-networked universe of the blogs?

update: fixed a bad link.