Some Changes In Comments
Posted by Bill @ 2:09 amIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
For those of you have tried to comment in the past only to never see your submission appear here there’s a reason for that. In an effort to stop comment spam I was using a program that inserted a simple math question into the comment fields that had to be answered correctly before the system would take your comment. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to work all that well on IE7 (and perhaps even IE6). I don’t know why and I tried to monkey with it but it just would work correctly.
So, I got rid of it and decided to go with a new system that didn’t rely on fancy stuff like JavaScript in order to create the math question. Unfortunately that didn’t work out either. Within the first few hours after switching to the new spam protection I received about 100 spam comments. Not fun. I turned that plugin off and tried something new.
So then I activated a feature in blogging software that requires people to create an account and log in to comment. I know it’s a pain in the butt however I would rather do that turn off all comments or sift through hundreds (if not thousands) of spam comments a day.
ADVISORY
Creating an account involves verifying your email address. Please note that in the 15+ years I’ve been involved with internet development I’ve never sent an unsolicited email. I don’t believe in it, never have, and never will.
You have the option of whether or not you register. Yes, you won’t be able to comment without doing so but the choice is completely up to you. I wish I didn’t have to do that but you can thank the comment spammers who flood this site with ads for everything from ring tones to male enhancement drugs.
Unfortunately some spam still was slipping through. I put back the math verification just as an extra step though so you have one more hoop to jump through.
Again, my apologies but I guess that’s what I get when I try to fix something 
License
This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
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COMMENTS / 8 COMMENTS
Absinthe added these pithy words on Mar 20 07 at 2:52 amI’ve had pretty good luck with a combination of first-time moderation + an anti-spam image captcha plugin that I dug up somewhere - every once in a while I get a storm of pharmaceutical spams but it’s pretty easy to hit ‘mark all as spam’ and they generally stop after a while.
Bill added these pithy words on Mar 20 07 at 3:23 amHey Ryan,
Any recommendations? It looks like the number thing isn’t working.
Bill
acefilleddreams added these pithy words on Mar 20 07 at 4:15 amBill,
Before i used blogger i used image verification. Not sure if it is available to you…
gadzooks64 added these pithy words on Mar 20 07 at 7:51 amOh sure, you really just hate us.
I’m sure of it.
Haley H added these pithy words on Mar 20 07 at 9:11 amAlright, I’ve signed up for RiniSpam. Did you know that Hawaiians eat more Spam (on a pounds per capita basis) than residents of any other state?
Kajagugu added these pithy words on Mar 20 07 at 11:37 amSo now I have to use FireFox to see the math questions, get a WordPress login to be able to leave a comment and know how to do first grade math? I wish my e-mail was this good at stopping spam…
Bill added these pithy words on Mar 21 07 at 2:51 amNo on the Firefox. I went with the one that didn’t have IE problems.
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