Comments have been opened yet again. So obviously the WordPress bug that’s periodically turning off comments on all the posts on the site has still not been resolved. If ya see the comments closed at any point in the future, please feel free to drop me an e-mail and let me know.
On the back end, although Akismet has been doing a generally great job keeping spam off the actual site, the Alexandrian has been getting hammered by spammers. (500+ spam comments per day.) So it’s clear that the math problem anti-spam thing has been completely cracked. On the basis of nothing except my gut, I suspect that all this spam may be triggering the bug.
So I need a new solution for preventing the spam from getting posted in the first place. Therefore, the math problems are gone and we’re going to be trying out a Turing Test check box. Let me know if you have any problems with it.
What I’m hoping to avoid is a CAPTCHA system. I find them to be both annoying and a bit of an eyesore. But I’ve got to do something to shoo away all these Russian Viagra dealers. (I blame myself for the essays I wrote about my translation of The Seagull. Apparently if you put Cyrillic text on your website you’re basically laying out a welcome mat for Russian spammers.)
You should check out Disqus; it’s what I use on my WordPress blog. It basically offloads managing all of that crap onto someone else, and can require authentication… and let Twitter/Facebook/Google handle that. I’ve been pretty happy with it, and haven’t had spam issues.
..
:knock on wood:
my comment was going to be basically the same as his but i was going to sell it differently. I know some people hate when sites require you to login to your social media account so for the record Disqus does have a “Name/Email” option that you can turn on or off. So people who WANT to use their disqus or twitter accounts are fine and people who just want to comment without all that hassle are also fine.