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Comments reenabled

dolphinling — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 11:38:58 +0000

So after only a year and two months, comments are finally reenabled here. I’m now using Akismet and Bad Behavior for spam blocking. Hopefully, it will work out well enough to leave it open (I didn’t like having to skim through 200 spams a day to find the on average 0 actual comments there).

Comments closed (hopefully temporarily)

dolphinling — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 02:56:17 +0000

I was getting about 200 spams a day to this blog, so I’ve turned comments off, hopefully temporarily. Sometime when I have more time, I’ll get a better solution in place (I’m out of school in a month, so probably then).

Bad Behavior

dolphinling — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 19:02:35 +0000

I’ve just enabled Bad Behavior here. If it gives you any problems, please contact me.

Trust paths through OpenID

dolphinling — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 01:11:35 +0000

Okay. So you know how OpenID is an actually viable identification system? And you know how PGP/GnuPG have a concept of signing other people’s keys to establish trust paths?

Well, I was just thinking about blog comments, and a) how now that I have them re-enabled, I’m getting spam, and b) I’d like to enable OpenID, and I got an idea (which, if you read the first paragraph, you’ve probably already figured out). Why not extend OpenID to also allow trust paths? Basically, if I trust Anne to be a real person and not a spammer, and he trusts Ian, I can be pretty sure that Ian’s not a spammer. And if Ian’s server is compromised and a spammer starts sending stuff as him, or if he’s paid off by the Evil Spam Operators to “trust” them, then I can either blacklist Anne, blacklist Ian, nofollow Anne (so I trust him but don’t trust his contacts), or even just wait for Anne to take care of it.

Obviously it could be fleshed out a bit more (max depth for trust paths?) and in implementations too (temporary blacklist: blacklist Anne for 24 hours and renew automatically if I got any comments through his trust path that looked like spam, else re-trust), but it looks like a start.

Thoughts?

Blog upgraded, comments now work

dolphinling — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 05:09:30 +0000

I needed to fix comments here, so I had a few choices. a) Figure out what was wrong, or b) just upgrade and let that fix it.

I upgraded. That fixed it.

As a downside, I no longer have the comment validation plugin. Someone should write a plugin that parses all input as HTML 5 and re-serializes it as valid whatever-language-you’re-using.

Edit: And let the blogspam begin! I’m holding all comments for moderation now. I think you can get around that by registering an account here or something (?) but I basically don’t care yet. Maybe I’ll look into it once I actually understand enough PHP to make changes.

dolphinling — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 11:05:41 +0000

Oh. I guess the reason no one’s left a comment on my blog in ages is that there isn’t a comments form.

I should fix that… today, probably. Right now I’m tired.

Installed ComPreVal

dolphinling — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 13:40:27 +0000

I just installed ComPreVal. Hopefully it should do the same pseudo-XHTML* checking and forced preview as what I had before, and hopefully without the backslash problem I had before. Bug me if anything’s broken.

* Pseudo because it’s text/html. If this for some reason offends you you can think of it as (pseudo-X)HTML. As to why I’m publishing anything at all with a text/html MIME type and an XHTML (Transitional, ewww) doctype, it’s because that’s how the CMS came, and I don’t have the skills to fix it… yet.