Prepare for Technical Difficulties

Ken has graciously allowed me to butt in here to announce that the comments system will be undergoing some changes in order to foil spammers.

Right now, all comments made from an IP address for the first time are held in a queue, which I manually comb for spam and delete. After a comment from a certain IP address has been approved once, it is allowed through automatically. (This might explain why the first time you posted, nothing showed up right away, but now everything does.) The advantage of this system is that it’s 100% effective. The disadvantage (aside from requiring manual approval from me), is that as the number of new human posters has decreased, the number of would-be spammers has gone through the roof. In the early days of this year, I would have a dozen spam and six or seven real comments every morning. Now, the site receives only one new human commenter every few days, and approximately 1,500 spam comments every day.

While I don’t mind deleting the spam — it actually gives me a little thrill to personally squash those nefarious robots — I’m terrified that the amount of noise will cause me to not notice an actual reader’s comment, and thus accidentally banish them from any further posting. Therefore, I am going to experiment with a few different auto-screening programs that are 99% effective, but will require some little task (a math problem, a series of letters and numbers) from you to allow comments to post.

Not all of these programs will be friendly with the fancy AJAX in the site template. Please leave me feedback if you are having issues by e-mailing to my first name at my full name dot com (or, if possible, leave a comment on this post, or a note in the forum). The best case scenario will be a new system that works and doesn’t let spam through by this weekend.

Thanks for your patience. All hail Jabootu!

  • hk6909

    I’m down with that. This is the last place I want spammers.

  • Songino

    What about some word verification thing?

  • Chris Magyar

    Word verifications give me hives, so I’m giving this alternative spam program a shot first. It promises to intercept robots behind the scenes. If it works, this whole public post will have been for naught, but we’ll see … I never underestimate the tenacity of machines.

  • Whatever needs done, needs done.

  • LukeB

    Here thar be robots!

  • As long as the webmaster is reading: the “Blog” link on the main page just leads back to the main page, not to the blog.

    Hey, you didn’t think the Minister of Proofreading would limit himself to reviews, did you?

  • Jack Spencer

    Spammers suck, yo. I say they make the penalty for spamming death by tac nuke. Grow some mushrooms in Nigeria and other places rife with spammers.

  • TheMark

    So in other words Chris has to protect one of the last vestiges of humanity from an army of thinking machines looking to enforce their will on society. Perhaps someone will make a movie about this some day and Ken can review it. Good luck Chris, and beware of large Austrian men from the future who are looking to consolidate your home loan.

  • Chris Magyar

    Well, a full week with the new super-duper behind-the-scenes spam killer, and so far NOT A SINGLE ROBOT COMMENT HAS GOTTEN IN. The machines have been defeated … for now.

    Carl: I’m unable to duplicate your problem. What browser/platform are you using? (And thanks for your catches in the reviews of dead links and whatnot. I’m getting around to them slowly but surely.)