creativity/machine

So, this is what I hope will be the final compromise in my long and bloody battle against comment spam: I found a plugin for MT called mt-close2 which allows you to close off comments on entries older than a specified no. of days, and in particular categories - I am so grateful to the person who made this script I could kiss him/her. A lot.

So all current posts are now open slather for comments.

I can’t keep wading through 300 spam comments every morning, trying to find any legit comments and deleting the bogus ones. (And I can’t keep looking at the increasingly unsavoury titles of the comments, especially not right after breakfast).

So I’ve disabled comments, which I am very angry about. If you want to respond to something you read here, do it via your own blog, I guess.

As more and more bloggers are turning comments off, I wonder how long it will be before we start seeing waves of trackback spam?

My comments are busted on certain entries (i.e. the last 5 or so) and I have absolutely no idea why, because I haven’t touched anything, I swear. I’m investigating; in the meantime, comment here instead, or just hold your breath

It is with a heavy heart that I have to let you know I’ve turned on moderation for comments. This means I’ll have to manually approve comments before they can appear publicly.

This is a last-ditch effort to compromise between my desire for open discussion and the ever-increasing flow of spam comments (I’m talking 200+ ads daily for cialis, online gambling and porn, all of which I have been deleting each morning, usually while silently screaming obscenities). I viewed this early morning ritual as some kind of silent war between my own stubbornness and the merciless advance of an invading force. I have decided that I am losing this war really badly.

I don’t know if moderation will create less work for me (probably not), but at least it will prevent the pollution of the public version of my blog. And it’s better than disabling comments, or demanding that all visitors sign up for a typekey “identity” before they can post a comment.

urgh. Sometimes I feel almost as frustrated about ICTs as my students do.

Overnight I’ve been hit with a wave of (i.e. nearly a hundred) spam comments. I’m thinking of closing off comments to older entries, but I don’t really like the implications of this. I know that Tom from Plastic Bag changed the names of comment tags to hide them to spambots, so I might have a hunt through his archives and see how he did it.

Plus for some reason pings have stopped working.

Update:
So I got all brave and installed the upgrade to the free version of Movable Type 3.0 so that I could use TypeKey to require comment authentication. Except the server is missing some modules, and I can’t use the TypeKey authentication system without them. Pffft. It’s Friday and I still have more work to do.

Oh, and in a non-technical aside: if you’re here to leave a rant in the comments section of my post linking back to Steven Shaviro’s “Sympathy for Lynndie England”, I’ve taken it down. I know this move is totally against the dominant ideology of blogging (a dominant ideology that thinks blogging is always trying to be journalism), but I don’t want to be a war blogger.

I’ve just edited my xml feed so that it will provide full posts, including images and links. (And I will definitely have to stick to my plan of using only absolute links from now on).

The RSS 1.0 feed is still excerpts only, so take your pick.

Here’s why.

Which reminds me, I’m about due to back this one up again…but I’m sure I can put it off until tomorrow…

Just when I thought I had this blog running nicely, I awoke this morning to discover that the comment spammers have found me. This means I will probably have to wade through the anti-spam plugins, tricks and fixes soon.

The dark colours got old very quickly, so I’ve compromised between the old and the new. I’m not completely satisfied with the way the comments and trackback listing pages look, but I’ll work on it.

I also need to create a sideblog, to keep the linkdumps (posts where I’m just noting something I’ve found and not adding much original content to speak of) separate from the main blog entries, to give the main section a bit more integrity I guess. This is not as easy as it seems, though. There are three options as I see it:

1. create a separate weblog which will then be displayed in a container on the main page of this one (an inelegant and inconvenient solution - for one thing, updates to the sideblog won’t count as updates to the main site)
2. use the MT Exclude Categories plugin to exclude the sideblog posts from the main page, and then include them in a sidebar container (I tried this, but for some reason I ended up with every single post not in the sideblog category displayed in the main section, even though by default my main page displays the last 7 days of posts - I may have done something wrong, so I’ll have another go).
3. Use Liza’s solution, which is to explicitly include all categories other than the sideblog category in the main blogpost section - again, not a perfect solution because it means editing that tag every time a category is added or renamed, and it also means I can’t give the sideblog “postlettes” additional categories for future reference. Despite that, it may be the easiest solution in the end.

Any suggestions?? I’m feeling the limits of my technical creativity here.

[update:] I made the Exclude Categories plugin work - Yay. I just had to specify days=”7″ rather than lastn=”10″. It works perfectly, so I don’t think it’s such a miserable hack after all. And I have just worked out how to format it so that it doesn’t dominate the page. Feelin’ good.

After a few minor dramas importing from my old Blogger-powered weblog, and a few tedious hours re-categorising posts and tweaking css, here I am, all moved in and ready to blog. Feel free to pop a cork in honour of the event.