Back to normality (or so I hope)

Posted on January 22, 2005

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!