Dangling Conversations

Colour commentary on the world we live in

Slight protection

Posted 12 Sep, 2005 at 00:35 by matt in /System | Permanent link

Another new feature: only people who are able to count letters in a word will be allowed to post.

Hopefully this will not include automated blog.spammers, but we'll see how this works. Sometime later this week I'll be going through the comment files and removing what spam has accreted there.

Comments (6 comments so far)
If This Works....
It will only have taken two tries! (of course, testing the more important case of wrong #, no comment :-)
Posted 2005/9/12 03:26:46 by Kael
Argh!
Apparently this isn't working.
Posted 2005/9/14 05:30:03 by Kael
ooo! Can we try an audio captcha next?! Play a short snippet of a song and then as for the next word in the lyrics?! ;)

Hmm... okay... I guess we can't always count on people having speakers handy... but it is a nice one since speech recognition is fairly difficult to get around.

Another harder one would be something that relies on pictures like this one

Posted 2005/9/14 06:22:50 by Blue
ooo! Can we try an audio captcha next?! Play a short snippet of a song and then as for the next word in the lyrics?! ;)

Hmm... okay... I guess we can't always count on people having speakers handy... but it is a nice one since speech recognition is fairly difficult to get around.

Another harder one would be something that relies on pictures like this one

Posted 2005/9/14 06:23:01 by Blue
There are Captcha modules for blosxom that rely on pictures, but they also require certain back-end software that I'm not sure exists on our platform.
Posted 2005/9/14 11:45:37 by Matt
Eureka!
Close examination of the raw comments files suggests that what we've been seeing has been spamming via TrackBacks... which are supposed to be automated to some extent, and thus it wouldn't make sense to trap them using Captcha stuff.

Since this blog's a bit of an isolate, I've disabled TrackBacks entirely for now. There's almost certainly a better solution -- maybe one that involves separating the comment and TrackBack functions to a greater extent than the current setup does -- but this should work for now.

Also, I've scoured obvious spam out of the comments; in a couple of cases, this meant editting files to leave actual comments in, which is why a couple of posts now appear on the "recently commented" list with no recent comments. I've left in comments which are pointless without being spam (i.e. "you all need to get lives" on an iPod post some months back).
Posted 2005/9/14 15:39:15 by Matt
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Blue has been known to toss a disc around a field from time to time, and thinks that you should as well. He lives either on the Internet or in Toronto, depending on your perspective. Ask him no questions and there's a good chance he'll tell you no lies. [Site]

Brent hosts the box from which we dangle our conversations, for which we are all eternally grateful. Gratitude is most easily expressed in small bills. Formerly a pawn of the Evil Empire (or maybe a Knight), he has gone over the wall and now toils at a small computer game company in Alberta that no one except for ten million gamers has ever heard of. [Site]

Kael occasionally gets called "Mike"; mostly by people who don't know him. He cooks, he cleans, he maintains Unix servers... what else could you ask for? Currently a slave to the Man, by which we mean retail sales. He has secret plans, but we can't tell you about them. In fact, we've already said too much. [Site]

Lisa is a recreational therapist without a cause. She entertains dreams of ruling over an empire of scrapbooking. Has a well-deserved reputation for enthusiasm, common sense, and tiredness. Ask her about her teapots, but don't touch them.

Matt is just this guy, you know? A mathematician by training and a layabout by inclination; he currently has an Urban Commuter Campus in the American Midwest convinced that they should pay him for plying these trades. The designer and administrator of this site, which means in a sense this is all his fault. [Site | E-mail]

Sky is a salesman during the day. At night he doesn't bother: his words are like unto those of a god, and you can agree or you can be wrong. Lives in the World of Warcraft, with a sattelite office in Toronto. Known to play games on occasion.

Wendy has never run away to join the circus, but pursuing graduate work in medical imaging is perhaps just as good. She didn't choose her current abode on the basis of proximity to a Toronto Public Library branch, but we wouldn't put it past her. Married to one of the other authors here, but you'll have to read the archives to find out which one. [Site]

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