jibber jabber

First, some links:

Made a small change to my blog. You now have to answer an incredibly difficult skill testing question when making comments. The idea was to reduce comment spam. I made the change a couple (or maybe it was only one?) days ago, and I’ve only received one comment spam since (versus 10-20/day), so it seems to be working. yay.

I’ve been super tired, recently. Waking up later. Getting to work later. Staying at work later. Getting back later. Eating later. … It’s a vicious cycle. I finished WoT book 6 on my way home, today. Good stuff. Now, I think I’d like to fool around w/my Zaurus a little… try a different environment while I’m in between books (since that’s mostly what I use it for – reading). Side note: holy crap it was cold outside! Not a good night to miss the bus and have to wait 1/2 an hour!

Now, about that sleep….

8 comments

  1. I got another one overnight, so 2 total… so far (awaiting moderation). I don’t use akismet, but I just may look into that. They probably get through by either randomly trying different values for all form fields, or when the spam software gets denied, the spammer can take a look at the site and add a value specific to it? Just guessing. Maybe it even parses the field label? Who knows how advanced spam s/w is….

    Wait, did I just talk about a spammer without any hateful words? :O Something’s wrong….

  2. Akismet is built-in (wp2+) under plugins.
    I noticed I am getting less spam this week. 20 caught by Akismet instead 150 per day, 1 awiating for mod instead of 10.

    I am thinking even if we take away the submit button or the comment box, there’s still a way for the spam to get through. There’s no way the spambots are using the HTML forms.

  3. wow. i’m sure the spammers are working as hard as you do to let their stuff go through.

    you wanna try taking away the submit button for a day or two and see what happens?

  4. that MORESUKINE piece on gender.. stuff i never knew about! fastinating

    do i get rewarded with a bigger name if i enter my website?

  5. Yeah, I knew Askismet sounded familiar. I looked at it before, but never bothered with it because it’s YATTGAAF. Still at 2 spam and counting since adding the challenging question, so it’s doing surprisingly OK, actually. šŸ™‚

    Even without a submit button, the form would still have a submit action, which I’m sure is all they (spambots) use. It probably grabs all the form inputs, fills them in with values, then performs the form action. Or something. Someone should work their way into the seedy underworld of spam and see what’s going on. I volunteer John, now that he’s learned the secret of big names.

    I hadn’t actually read all the ????? when I posted, but I have now. Really well done.

  6. NoooooO!!! I am genuinely disappointed at the skill question. I was really hoping for some rock-hard kick-ass calculus (calculator on one hand, wikipedia on one tab) to comment like a champion.

    Now all I feel is like a kindergartener.

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