Spam and the comment policy

The new version of MT and MT-Blacklist haven’t been deployed for 24 hours yet and already I’ve had dozens of attempts at spamming my site silly.

Let’s see how long this holds until I may have to finally decide to forgo comments altogether.

Anyway, since interfering with the comment-flow of my readers is something that disturbs me, I’ve made public a page detailing the comment policy on NunoNunes.org as a whole (which applies most strongly to Nowhereland at this time).

It’s the least I can do…

Be careful young man, that music you listen to today will come back to haunt you!

It was the end of a long friday at the office. Everyone was getting ready to go home. There was almost only us at my department in there and only a few other people from other departments around.

Someone decides he is too tired to continue working and, as the other people continue doing the kind of things you do on a Friday evening (which don’t require too much attention otherwise you’ll just screw something up just before the weekend, and we all know what that means), the conversation starts to drift towards the musical realm.

Someone brings up the memory of an old 80’s song. A bad 80’s song. The guy who has stopped working still has his Mac turned on and has this huge music collection just at his grasp.

So he finds the song and starts playing it. Only his iBook speakers aren’t all that powerful and some people want to listen to it without having to come over to his desk (this is all open-space but we are quite a few so there is a lot of space between us).

Well, it just so happens that I brought my old 4.1 speaker set (complete with subwoofer) to the company a long time ago and I too have a Mac. So I just look for the music he is playing on his shared list (iTunes rocks, you know?) and play it on my bad-ass speakers.

And now everybody on the department gets to listen to it. The people on the other departments also get to listen to it, but not too much as there is a cabinet barrier between us and I haven’t turned it up that loud anyway.

But then something starts to happen. This song reminds someone of another, even worse one. And he gets it. And it gets played on my speakers.

And it goes on and on until after a while we have the speakers blasting bad 80’s music, we are all joking around as if in a party, people who have decided to leave for home an hour ago are still there enjoying it and we have covered everything from the likes of Modern Talking to Sandra, Lionel Ritchie, Samantha Fox, Rick Astley, Bananarama, Falco, Nena, Stevie Wonder… You name it, we probably listened to it!

And every time a new song starts to play people are just rolling with laughter and trying to remember all the other songs this one reminds them of.

We even had a couple of friends chiming in, via IM, with suggestions, once they found out what we where doing at the office.

I did get some work done in the meantime, sure, but it was one hell of an evening and a great time.

But you want to know the thing that scares me the most about this? While nowadays I have to write everything down because I have a terrible, terrible memory, I still remembered almost every single song we listened to. And I could name the group or song that someone was thinking about given the song name, the group or even by listening to them hum it, on an instant’s notice. How crazy is that?

I guess al those garage parties I went to as a teenager did leave their mark after all…

Back to normality (or so I hope)

After a bit of work on performing a somewhat esoteric upgrade, Nowhereland is, once again, open to comments.

Now for the not-so-good news: since I can’t live with spam, I had to take measures against it which will sadly also impact the legitimate users.

From now on I will only allow direct posting from users who are authenticated via TypeKey. Users who do not wish to authenticate using this service will have their posts held until I can look at them and approve them by hand.

I intend to approve everything as long as it is not spam. Well, almost everything, this is my weblog and I will exercise discretion while moderating the more “extreme” posts, but you get the idea. I apologize in advance for the delay this will introduce to your posting experience, but I just couldn’t live with hundreds of spam posts every 3-4 days. And believe me it was that bad!

In fact, after the upgrade to MT3 I put the site on-line to try out a few things before installing the MT-Blacklist plugin and guess what? In those 15 minutes the site was up with no protection (but with every post moderated) I was hit with 26 spam posts. I didn’t post anything new, so I didn’t ping any aggregator or anything. I just put it online again, that’s it!

Well, I’ve installed the Blacklist plugin, I’ve changed the comment CGI’s name, I’ve added extra fields to the comment form, I’ve done all that was practical to do on a short amount of time. Now I sit back and watch what happens.

Let’s see if this is enough. After all this isn’t exactly a high-profile weblog. I’m hopeful. But carefully so.

Let the games begin. Again!