Thursday, October 28, 2004
Registration?
There have been 12 comment spams today.
That is on par with what we’d traditionally expect in the course of a month. It’s been building to that the past few days.
I have turned on censoring, eliminated the curses and added some key expressions designed to render the spams less useful even if I don’t delete them. I seem to have hit on a way, accidentally, in which using that will wipe out the entire content of a comment spam except the “name” of who posted it and the associated URL. Which can’t be affected by the censoring, or modified short of deletion.
Since I don’t want them to have the satisfaction of even having that URL picked up and strengthened in search engines, I have been deleting. That’s not that difficult or tedious, but it irritates me each time I have to do it.
Make that 13 today…
I love getting comments. I love freely leaving comments without having to register. I don’t end up registering most places where it is required, and because centralization and trying to be the Microsoft of blogging tools feels reprehensible, am explicitly refusing to register with Typekey or, as a result, comment anywhere it’s required.
Therefore it is with great trepidation that I even think about requiring registration to comment here. This is why I am asking what people think of it. Regular commenters?
This will be moot if we mosey on over to Expression Engine, as it has more options than pMachine for handling the scum.
Update:
Aw fudge! I just figured out that whatever I did to the censoring to make the spam comments unexpectedly be blank has made ALL comments blank. Doh!
Update again:
Fixed. The inclusion of entire URLs in the censored list apparently caused it to blank all comments.