About Karma

I ought to put up a post explaining how different bits of the site work. Referrer Karma is a really useful tool that helps with this site. It’s one of those things you shouldn’t notice working. One of the problems with weblogs is that they attract robots. This trundle along the web and try to place adverts on any sites they find. Usually for online poker but they’ll advertise anything. This could be a problem for me because I have the list of referrers on the right which would be attractive for any robots. They’d move from a casino page onto this one and leave the note on the right saying where they came from. Because they’re robots repetition is not a problem and they could do this hundreds of times and cause me a serious bandwidth problem.

What Referrer Karma does is check the pages that lead to this one. If they’re genuine they get added to a whitelist. The viewer doesn’t see anything special happen. If the page cannot be checked or fails it goes into the blacklist. The viewer sees a barrier and instructions on how to get round it. The robots can’t deal with this, but humans should be able to. I then check the blacklist entries to check they’re correct.

An example of Karma getting it wrong was a link from Glasgow University. Someone emailed a link to someone at Glasgow. They clicked on it and Karma tried to check the webpage. Because Karma can’t read people’s emails the check failed and Glasgow was blacklist. People at Glasgow University could still see the site, but had trouble if they clicked on a link on a page hosted at gla.ac.uk.

The benefit of this is that I can take moderation off recent posts. If you put a comment on a post within a week of it going up, or someone else commenting you should see the comment go up immediately. I’m happy for people to say I’m right or I’m wrong about something. But I’d rather not have them offer to refinance my debts. There are one or two exceptions. I often have to pass my own comments through moderation for some reason. —–