Archive for the ‘site updates’ Category
Battling comment spam
UPDATE:
I’m leaving this post in place for historical purposes, but quite a while ago I dropped AuthImage in favor of Spam Karma, which seems to do an excellent job of blocking pretty much all my comment spam.
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I’ll be honest: comment spam really hasn’t been THAT big of a problem here on slidingconstant.net. So far, I’ve been able to filter almost all of it into my moderation queue just by adding some stuff to my blocked words list.
However, I just really hate the idea that some automated bot can so easily create more work for me to do (namely, reviewing my moderation queue). The last straw, so to speak, was when other friends of mine had to shut down commenting on their site because of massive moderation queues. So, I decided today to follow up on something that I had thought about before (and that another friend Rick confirmed was possible in WordPress).
Enter the AuthImage plugin. This little gadget uses a type of visual “puzzle” called a captcha, which requires the commenter to enter the letters he/she sees in an image in order to post the comment.
Unfortunately, this method excludes potential commenters who are unable to view the image (images disabled, text browser, blind user, etc.). However, since my commenters are a pretty small group anyway, I’ve decided that I’m willing to trade the likely zero drop in legitimate comments for not having to deal with comment spam.
Syndication Working
It appears that I now have syndication working properly for the site. 
Commenting is Enabled
Well, the site changes are finally live. Commenting is now enabled on Sliding Constant. Admittedly, no one is going to see this post for a while (since I don’t have syndication set up again yet), but we’ll get there.