No more URLs in comments, please
Ok, I am sick and tired of getting ninety spam comments to one half-interesting comment on this blog. Therefore I turned off any link submitting in the comments and do not display the URL of the author automatically any longer.
I am sorry I had to do this - and I will display your URL when you commit a sensible comment, but I’d rather spend my time writing books than updating my spam filters every two days.
I only hope that each and every one of these lowlife spammers ends up in jail with a bunch of men pumped full of viagra who had penis operations that made them huge and have lots of stamina and energy due to whatever crappy drug that is sold over the pond at this time of year.
September 11th, 2006 at 10:20 pm
How come you don’t use akismet(.com)? It blocks over a hundred a week for me now, I occasionally browse through and click ‘delete all’, but you don’t have to, they disappear after 14 days.
September 11th, 2006 at 10:39 pm
I thought about it, but it requires to update my wordpress, and I have customized it so heavily that it is going to be a pain to reinstall. Then again, I am moving to a new server soon anyways…
September 17th, 2006 at 2:20 pm
I don’t think that a new server would solve the spam issue - you’d better go with Aksimet or at least the WP blacklists - I got rid of all the spam this way.
September 19th, 2006 at 9:28 am
That is a real problem… I even had to disallow comments on one of my pages where I had to delete almost fifty spam messages a day!
To prevent this, one has to:
1- either protect the submission form,
2- or review all comments before publishing.
I’d rather not use the second solution, even though I believe this is the one you use. I simply don’t have to time to do that.
For people like me, this leaves the first solution. However, we don’t want our visitors to get burdenned with a multi-step registration system each time they want to leave a comment, or even the first time.
In this situation, temptation is great to use those images where distorted letters are drawn and blurred, and you ask the visitor to tell what those letters are.
But I refuse to use this method. It is probably the most unaccessible one I know of. As a matter of fact, I even have a hard time reading those letters and I am not disabled in any way!
So I had the idea to adapt my message form, so that it is merged with the registration form when the visitor is unknown (from cookies), thus making anonymous comments impossible:
- People who have registered in the past and still have the cookie would only be asked for their message, which would then automatically be published.
- People who have registered in the past but lost/deleted the cookie would be asked their login data along with the message data, and the message would be automatically published after authentication has succeded.
- Other visitors would click a “I’m not registered” link which would redisplay the form to accept the new-member-information instead of the login data, along with the message data; such a message would go to a queue for review. The webmaster would register the user as a member and accept the message, only if the latter is a real message and not SPAM.
Considering it can be done (I can do it), do you think it would be a good solution for usability? I thank you in advance for providing your much valued point of view.
Yves.