October 08, 2007

Comments of Crap II - The Fallout

I'll post this here as really I can't be arsed doing it anywhere else.

I'm sure that there are a lot of people who don't use this blogging system provided so kindly for us by Pixy. There are a lot of good features on here and one of the better ones is being able to delete comments that arrive via your email so you don't have to keep visiting your blog to cull them. A handy little script spots the URL, the commenter, the IP address and off you go - you can delete the comment, blacklist the entries and the IP address (or range of them) and rebuild you blog, thus denying the spamming link whores the attention they deserve.

Occasionally a spamming link whore will have worked out a way of entering links that break this system, usually by leaving open brackets that the script for the blacklist will interpret as code being incomplete. Because of how the comments are delivered and you have a button the delete, add the spam to the blacklist, then rebuild it most people just hit the link.

That's why it's there. So the non-technical people can do it as a no brainer.

Then you get the people who may be somewhat technically minded getting all annoyed because occasionally someone breaks the list. Someone who is being comment spammed, who is not technically literate, or someone who is in a hurry. Yeah, it's annoying that it gets broken - it's broken at the moment. However it's not the end of the world and, let's face it, Pixy doesn't HAVE to do what he does in terms of the maintenance.

So lighten up. We're all in this together.

Posted by AlexC at 01:40 PM | Comments (3)