Comment Fail

If you’ve tried to leave comments here recently, bless you, and I’m sorry.

First, the WP-OpenID plugin for one specific version (2.2.0) had a bug which ate comments containing double quotes, which means all comments with links in them. 2.2.1 fixes the problem.

Then, Luis Villa told me in email that the Captcha on my site was unusable. So I tried it, and he’s right.

A while back I installed a plugin for Mollom, which catches comments which are thought to be suspicious in one way or another, and then asks users to solve a captcha. Problem is that they were all unsolvable.

Or, rather, they were perfectly solvable, and I solved them - as I’m sure Luis had. But Mollom refuses to recognize my solutions. Maybe I really am a computer, and thus fail the Captcha.

Anyway, the point is, I’m not trying to make it difficult to comment on this blog, just trying to deal with spam. I’ve turned Mollom off again, and won’t re-enable it until I try it myself and see that it works.

Mollom anti-spam

I’ve enabled Mollom-based anti-spam to this blog - please let me know if this causes any unexpected difficulty or errors.

Mollom will ask “suspicious” commenters to solve a CAPTCHA before allowing their comments to post.

If this proves too onerous I will go back to just using Askimet but I wanted to try it out.

Thanks to Dries, Benjamin, et al for running Mollom and to Matthias Vandermaesen for maintaining the WP-Mollom plugin.

Blog Spam Poetry

I’m inspired this morning to think I may create a weekly or monthly blog spam poem, assembled from the best lines of comment spam this blog recieves.

My favorite blog spam comment of the day (with no link so as to not encourage them, and therefore no credit):

Candy cheap folklore urged birth heroic, carpet stain removal?!

Maybe it’s the faux sentimentality of the “birth heroic” smashed up against the prosaic “carpet stain removal,” but I like this particular piece of candy cheap folklore.

Candy cheap is like really really cheap - one step below bottom-shelf-liquor-cheap.

Just one question

11:15, Geneva time, from the lobby of the Ramada Park Hotel, as I catch up on blog comment moderation.

Has anyone, ever, anywhere in the universe, actually purchased Xanax based on a blogspam comment? Or even visited the link to which the Xanax push pushes?