It seems that my strategy to contain the Spambot invasion within the same post has backfired on me as they ingeniously started throwing Sex ads… more than 10 just last night. Such links are not what I want on this blog.
So on top of deleting them all, I activated Blogger’s Word Verification system for comments (Colloquially called Captcha).
Which means that in order for you to leave a comment, you’ll have to prove that you are human… by retyping a series of letters/numbers before being allowed to post your comment. I know it’s highly annoying and this will probably lower the number of commenters on the blog… but it’s a compromise I had to make.
I strongly suggest you copy your comment to the clipboard before posting. Blogger has been known to have hiccups when you post the comment, so keep it near to re-post if something happens.
This also makes me think about migrating the blog to WordPress, which features a lot more cooler widgets and simpler, less annoying Captcha systems…. but not right now… (Migrating 120 posts is not going to be fun…)
I urge you to try your hand at commenting here, which I also dub as ChattyDM’s new graffiti wall.
This is a test comment by Chatty DM to see just how annoying Captcha is going to be…
I have to copy ukhpqg all in smallcaps…
The Captcha thing wont keep me from commenting. It has not shyed me away from other places. Now if I had to join the site that I wanted to comment on. Or buy magazine subscriptions. That would be another situation. This is no big deal. Especially to keep your blog from being spammed. Its truely a minor inconvience (sp?).
As Ronin said it’s the less annoying form of verification. (It’s only a few key stroke and a click more after all) 🙂
Having to register will turn down a lot more people as you have to give a return email address and their is always the fear that it’ll get use for spam.
Thanks for being understanding guys…
This deluge of Pr0n ads was a bit freaky…
🙂
The weird part, though, was that they were posted without accounts, with links in the name itself. The “Other” posting option has a field for website, but that wasn’t used. Instead, the name itself had the html code directly in it.
If there was a way to block posts from “*href=*”, all of them would be gone.
In any case, I’m left wondering just how long this captcha will last. Most widely used captchas are cracked already, rendering them almost useless. phpBB 2 is probably the worst example, there the default captcha does exactly nothing against phpBB2-targetting spambots.
I don’t know how secure the blogger one will be…
We’ll see. Shamus of Twenty Sided (who runs on WordPress) has installed a super simple Captcha that basically asks users to enter d20 and it’s completely killed spambots and has been okay for the last few months.
I opened a WordPress blog (chattydm.wordpress.com) and will explore it somemore
Alternatively, I could grant you admin access to this blog so you could poke around the template’s HTML.
This might have changed since, but I thought that WordPress blogs hosted on WordPress.com required you to have an account to comment. Not a problem for me since I have one, but it would cut into the number of comments you have.
Self-hosting wordpress, which is what we do for CH, definitely does not have this problem.
If you’re ready to make a jump and have any questions, feel free to ask me.
According to Ve4’s test on my ‘other blog’… registration does not seem to be necessary to leave a comment…
That’s good news!
I’ll probably look more seriously about the move in the following days/week). Now nothing is fundamentally broken… yet… so no hurry.
Well.. its seems that Captcha wont keep me from commenting. This answer is the living proof…
What do you know? 😉
Good to hear. WordPress does have a Blogger importer, so you shouldn’t have to do it by hand. (I moved my blogger blog to wordpress a while ago, and my brother had to write a custom script to do it… I hear nowadays the auto-importer works well)
Lol I get more comments in my metablogging posts than the rest!
And here I am sweating on the Pixie Sorcerer post… I’m putting the efforts on the wrong subjects! 🙂
Thanks D:TG and Mike(Kem), I’ve actually scouted a Hosting service with the help of Ve4grm and I might actually migrate to my very own domain name soon complete with, I kid you not, 100 SQL databases!! (Whatever those are)… It costs a 3rd of playing Wow per month and I am having as much fun!
Now if I could continue leveling up on Technorati as fast as I used to. 🙂
With my host it’s 1.2 gigs of space, 40 gigs of transfer, and unlimited mysql data bases. Like I’ll ever use all that many DBs.
WordPress Warning…
Make sure your browser is up to date. Certain files in WP 2.3.1 are a mess and in serious need of proofing. At the moment I can’t edit my blogroll because edit-links-form.php crashes my computer (Mac OS 9 and Netscape 7, I am saving up for a newer iMac).
Expression Engine might be an alternative, but the full version is $100.00 for a single user license. You can use EE Core for free however.
One last item. Does the host you’re looking at offer cPanel with Fantastico Deluxe? FD offers a number of installation scripts for blog engines (among other things) NucleusCMS, WordPress, B2Evolution among others. Or you could try one of the wikis they offer. Including one with a built in blog you could use to post and provide update on the other sections of the wiki.
Good luck.
I think your problem is Netscape 7. I’m pretty sure that nobody designs for Netscape any more. Especially with Netscape 9 being the latest version.
OS9 would be the other problem, as I don’t think that browsers are released for that any more at all.
But with Windows, OSX, or Linux, most people have a fairly recent browser. Windows will update IE automatically, to at least IE 6, OSX will update Safari automatically, and Firefox on all these systems will update automatically.
Expression Engine – good content management system, but overkill for a blog. Go with WordPress.
Yes, the host offers cPanel and Fantastico, as well as much more.
Thanks for the very tech saavy comments and suggestions.
I’m pretty sure I’ll port to WordPress in the foreseable future and I even got wifey to accept me paying a monthly hosting fee. So expect to see ChattyDM’s move from a seedy Blogger appartment to a swanky Mansion on the net…
If you need help getting things set up on the host, once you port, let me know. I’ve set up many things on that host, from wordpress to forums to full-blown content management systems, and can help guide you through anything unfamiliar.
Ve4, you are my new best-friend-that-lives-far-from-here!
Thanks, I will take you up for the offer!
Well, not that far.
In fact, I’m actually going to be out that way at the end of January/beginning of February. The concrete toboggan races are being hosted in Sherbrooke, Quebec.