 Hmm.
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Nov. 20th, 2010 @ 12:04 pm 
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So, I decided to start paying attention to my website again, partly due to various conversations I've had lately, partly due to a wish to, well, have something I'm doing that I can, at least somewhat, point out to other people and be more, hey, I'm doing that.
Was just briefly concerned that I had managed to nuke my blog in the process of updating WordPress, but no, this time it worked.
I've been wanting to get back to doing my blog (distinct from my journal, in that it's meant to be more considered stuff, more contenty even if you don't know me, kind of thing), and may in fact find it less tiresome now that I have come across the existence of the Bad Behaviour plugin, which I just installed. Hopefully my blog will generate more than just endless spam now.
(I blocked spam comments by requiring user registration to leave comments at all; this generated an endless wave of attempted spam user registrations. Depressing. I may alter comment settings now - not that it matters, since my blog, at present, is unread by anyone.)
Meanwhile, a conversation the other day, that went on being increasingly hilarious but I can't remember the rest:
Housemate.Dave (playing Fallout: New Vegas): I just assassinated the president with an orbital laser.
Me: You're a bad person.
Chas: And you should feel bad!
Dave: But it was awesome.
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Spam on WP is always a pain to deal with. I've managed to help curb it pretty well between the Akismet and Conditional CAPTCHA for Wordpress ( http://rayofsolaris.net/code/conditional-captcha-for-wordpress) plugins. One way to potentially help with not necessarily having to enforce registration to comment is by equipting OpenID ( http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/openid/). It's a bit of a pain to get configured right (there's a scripting error in the comments template that as to be corrected. I didn't think to make note of where I found the correction at, but if you want to install it, if you'll get back in touch, I can get the code for you off my own site). If you want to see it in action, you can check it out on my site at http://alexandriagable.com/Unfortunately, I haven't figured out the coding well enough myself to make it obvious that to sign in with OpenID you don't have to provide a name and email address... ^^;; It does work properly, though, so far anyway. It doesn't work as a provider, in my experience (and there's quite a bit of discussion about that error on the support boards, but I don't think a solution has been found yet). Also, if you're looking to help generate some more genuine traffic, try Feedburner. I'm running a fairly new installation of my site installed on Oct 31 of this year, and with only having been working on building it up over the last couple of days have gone from 0 to 9 subscribers in about 3 days time. An automated feed to twitter can help increase traffic as well, though that one comes with the potential for spam as well, but I've never experienced too much of an increase from it, and I have my DW RSS feeding into my public twitter and have never received a single spam message. And from the statistics analytics, the spam I've received on my WP sites have always been through referral links as opposed to twitter, so it hasn't been too bad of a turn out, anyway.
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| From: | ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) sami |
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November 20th, 2010 11:07 am (UTC) |
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I'm going to see how Bad Behaviour works out - if it works well, I don't have to enforce registration or require OpenID (although equipping it is a good idea).
I'm not going to use any form of captcha ever, a) because I find them really damn annoying when confronted with them myself, and b) because they render sites inaccessible to users with certain disabilities, which is something to which I'm philosophically opposed. (This is why my layout isn't optimal for my aesthetic preferences, because it is screenreader-compatible.)
But I do appreciate the suggestions.
I'm going to look at traffic generation when I've added some more actual content that's less than a year old.
The thing about the captcha plugin that I linked to is that for most people, it will never show up. It's strictly conditional to enforce itself for potential spammers. I sat and tried to force it to activate with anything that I could think of for standard comments from genuine humans, and it never activated. However, it's caught several spambots in the process and have kept me from having to deal with them. If you'll go to any of the comments pages on my site, you'll see there's no captcha form visible, as it's only activated for questionable comments that it believes are spam. It might be worth looking into to check that it doesn't interfere with the site's accessibility if the spambots get out of control. I don't think that it would, considering its hidden attributes, but I'm not absolutely sure on that.
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