I’ve wasted two hours today deleting comment spam and trying to spam proof the two Movable Type based blogs that coexist here, since I’m fairly positive that none of their readers are that interested in the enlarging of body organs. MT-Blacklist, which has been installed for a few months, just wasn’t cutting it for me, so it was time for more drastic measures. Comment moderation wasn’t feasible; Dorritta has better things to do this month (like marking exams) than delete 192 pieces of mail related to spam comments from her blog.
Elise has a very good summary of how to better spam proof a Movable Type installation; so far however it seems that the best part of the solution is James Seng’s “captcha” plugin, which adds an obscured picture of a number, e.g.: 
and then expects the commentor to type it in before the form is accepted, with the idea that a spam bot shouldn’t be able to turn the image into the correct number. As a computer graphics person, this makes perfect sense. Implementing my own solution occurred to me before I came to my senses and typed “image recognition movable type” into google. Installation was reasonable (fortunately I already knew what “libgd” and “Perl-GD” were from work). Unfortunately by adding this spam proofing, I’ve ruled out the possibility that visually impaired folks (or users of Lynx!) can add comments – and I’m the kind of anal person who puts “alt” attributes on absolutely every “img” tag. I’ve also realised that my adding comment capability to my own blog is probably not worth the effort. So, a big thank you to spammers of the world for making the Internet a more unfriendly place than it should be. I can only hope there’s some corner of hell kept toasty for you and your friends responsible for the 893 pieces of junk mail sent this week to my main e-mail address.
Speaking of sister, she recently mentioned getting published on her blog but didn’t provide a link to the journal. Well, here’s the table of contents at any rate. A comparison of that with my publication history should convince you that we can’t possibly be related and that one of us is in fact adopted, or according to Mom, found in the cabbage patch.
