No Comments
Comment spam is the scourge of blogging. I don’t exactly have a thriving community going here, so it’s not like turning comments off would make or break the Lunchroom — hell, half of the six or seven of you who actually read me probably wouldn’t even notice. But that would mean “they” won. I don’t like it when assholes win. So I have kept my comments turned on and battled the scumbags by using the Movable Type’ Blacklist plug-in.
Blacklist works pretty well at blocking the spam — from your end. You don’t see it because it doesn’t get published. But it does get logged on my end, behind the scenes. I get dozens of notifications daily of spam comments posted here that require moderation to publish — or delete. Most of your comments, the ones I want to see, publish automatically without my help; it’s the spam that Blacklist is cutting off at the pass, as it should. But it irks me to know I’ve got all these spam comments queued up behind the scenes and pending, waiting for my approval or deletion. I could just leave them that way and nobody would be the wiser but me. But because I’m anal about it, I go in daily and delete all those pending spam comments and add them to the Blacklist so they’ll get blocked next time.
Which is all fine and good. But. I’m getting tired of having to take out the trash every day. I have Beth ragging on me to do that here at the house, I don’t need it online too. I don’t want the trash here in the first place. Blacklist can muzzle it, but it isn’t keeping it out as antiseptically as I want.
Fortunately, I’ve found a solution: the Scode captcha plug-in. It looks pretty sweet. It sounds like it does exactly what I want. Me likey.
Unfortunately, I can’t get the fucking thing working. I tried installing it a few months ago and gave up after wasting something like 10 hours on it with no success other than fucking up the layout of my category archives and search result archives — a problem I still haven’t been able to fix.
This time around I’m at about three hours of working on it right now and I’m giving up early. The only success I’ve had this time is that I’ve succeeded in fucking up the comments both here and in Beth’s blog and they’re broken now so you can’t comment. Which I’m just fucking thrilled about, let me tell you.
So as it stands now, the spammers are winning, because my comments are now closed (by way of breakage) because I wanted them open. One step up, two steps back.
Pisses. Me. Off.
I’ll keep working on it later, but for now I’m just too fed up with it to continue. If any of you gurus out there have any ideas or can point me to someone who does, well feel free to fire away. Through email. Because, you know, my fucking comments are fucking broken.
Until then: No comments.