A quick update on the Steem Comment Blacklist API

^{Source: Pixabay}

Almost a week ago, I posted about The Steem Comment Blacklist API released for testing! A few days later, I created a simple bot called the Random comment picker, which utilises the API to filter out known non human made comments.

@sgt-dan made some thought provoking comments:

Yes, I prefer not to have my blog posts filled with spammy comments. Good job. I am glad I learned about this project during the last #PYPT Show!

Oh, I also added an account to your proposed blacklist @stopthemarkymark. Tired of seeing that crap.

to which I thought about and replied:

Cheers! Let's hope @steempeak can think about adding an option to hide comment bots using this API in the future.

Currently there are 173 known comment accounts (human added) and growing. Wouldn't it be great if a frontend, like @steempeak, could implement a toggle switch that would show/hide these comments? I think it would be great option to see your post with genuine comments, and at the flick of a switch—show all comments.

As the list grows, @jarvie suggests:

The question is would it slow down the site/user experience?

Yes, it's a valid concern. My thought about this would be to disable it by default (let the user decide). To make things more scalable, I have made the following changes:

1. The endpoint has been updated to: https://api.steem.design/commentBlacklist/accounts
   (original post edited to reflect new url)
2. Use CloudFront CDN to serve the requests. This means that requests from anywhere in the world can be achieved with low latency and high transfer speeds.

^{Source: AWS
Amazon CloudFront uses a global network of 200 Points of Presence
(189 Edge Locations and 11 Regional Edge Caches) in 77 cities across 37 countries.}

I hope that the Steem community can put my comment blacklist to good use. Finally, let me reiterate this again:

Whilst the list is titled a blacklist, being on it doesn't mean you are necessarily a "bad thing" on this platform. Rather, its primary purpose is to give Steem developers some idea of whether a comment was actually made by a human (and not a comment bot).

Please do let me know of comment bots not on the list by filling in the form here or by tagging me (application for removal is also on the previously mentioned form).

Yours truly,
@contrabourdon

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