Tasty treat

Tue, 12/27/2005, 19:42

If you so much as grin, you're going to hell.
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Blog spammers will be the first against the wall.

Mon, 12/26/2005, 03:42
Not that there's really anyone to notice, on this desolate expanse of unread blog, but comment spam is really fracking annoying, from an administration standpoint. Like anywhere else, it's mostly ads for prescription pills and online casinos, but every now and then, there's more "interesting" fare. One might consider my situation lucky, too. For the most part, I've been shielded from the brunt of the phenomenon by the purely serendipitous use of semi-obscure blogging software, but bits and pieces seep their way through every so often, not unlike drippings from my incontinent bunkmate "Phil", from summer camp.

In the course of investigating solutions to this problem (spam - not urine), I found that there's actually a dedicated term used to describe the distorted text recognition problems that many sites have you solve to register/post/comment. What I would like to do, if I were a motivated, bright, and inspired individual, is to implement my very own obscure CAPTCHA as part of this blog. It wouldn't be too hard to create a scripting language-based function to create an image from a random text string parameter, then run it through some matrix transformations.

This motivated, bright, and inspired individual, though, is not me. At least, not today, nor any foreseeable time in the next several weeks, as I struggle to overcome a bout of chronic stupid. So I might just wind up shuffling around the comment field order to trip the bots up, combined with .htaccess modding, since most spammers come from certain kinds of TLDs. It's not actually a fix; it's rather a bit like trying to improve test scores at a school by painting "EXIT" over all the entrances, and burning the short buses. The persistent (or oblivious) idiots still get through.

Oh, and another two-day email outage is coming up, to kill the email spam to my nospam@ account. As if this were ever actually a real problem, when a cursory glance at my inbox reveals a dearth of any human-generated content. Like I was saying not that long ago (in fact, four scrollwheel clicks down), I hate web work.
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