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 :-)
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Hi, my name is Bill Rini and this is my poker blog. I've been blogging about poker and the poker industry since around 2003-ish. Like most people I started out playing poker as entertainment in home games whenever we wanted to sit around and smoke cigars, drink beer, and eat pizza, and needed a good excuse. I started playing online shortly after the first online card rooms opened and it wasn't long before I was playing 20, 30, or even 40 hours a week or more. One day I received a phone call about a program manager position at Tiltware which was the company that consulted to Full Tilt Poker on software development and marketing. After Tiltware I spent about 2.5 years working at Party Poker where I was the poker room manager.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Testing 1, 2, 3
I’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.
Hey Ryan,
Any recommendations? It looks like the number thing isn’t working.
Bill
Bill,
Before i used blogger i used image verification. Not sure if it is available to you…
Oh sure, you really just hate us.
I’m sure of it. ;)
Alright, 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?
So 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…
No on the Firefox. I went with the one that didn’t have IE problems.