I’ve been getting too many spam comments slipping past Akismet lately, so I’m trying out reCAPTCHA to see if it’s useful.
I didn’t really want to add a CAPTCHA-based system in case it makes it harder to comment (and therefore might perhaps discourage people from posting comments, not that many do anyway) but I thought I’d give it a try. Also of course it’s hard on blind people.
I decided that, if I’m going to use any CAPTCHA system, I may as well use reCAPTCHA, since the effort used to decipher the image isn’t wasted, it’s helping to digitize books.
What do you think? Does a CAPTCHA put you off commenting? Are the reCAPTCHA images too hard to decipher? (That’s something I’m particularly worried about, some of the ones I’ve seen so far looked hard to read).
I’ve just added the Gravatar plugin to my WordPress install, allowing Gravatars to be displayed for comments.
Gravatars are “globally gecognized avatars” associated with an email address. The idea is that you can upload a small avatar (picture), and any site on which you post which supports them will be able to show that picture.
I found out about them from search.cpan.org which now supports them, and Andy Hexten produced a page showing gravatars of CPAN contributors (I’ve only just created one for my @cpan.org address, so I’m not on there yet).
I learnt something new today about WordPress. I thought it would be useful to schedule a post to be published automatically at a specified time in the future - occasionally I knock up a few different posts the same day/evening and don’t really want to release them all at once but would prefer to save them to be published at intervals.
This facility is built right in to WordPress - just use the post timestamp facility and set a date + time in the future (making sure to tick the “Edit timestamp” box):
Continue reading ‘Scheduling WordPress posts for the future’
The Subscribe to Comments plugin by Mark Jaquith allows anyone who posts a comment to your blog to elect to receive an email when any further comments are made.
This can really help to foster an active discussion from your blog readers, as people who have posted a comment will know if someone replies to a point they made, and can return to post further comments. Let’s face it, once you’ve read a post and commented, most people don’t have time to keep returning to check for any new comments.
Do yourself a favour, download Subscribe to Comments and install it (it’s trivially easy to install).
The default setup will add the “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” tickbox to the comment form. If you want to offer the ability to subscribe to comments without having to post a comment first, just add the following just after the closing </form> tag of the comment form:
<?php show_manual_subscription_form(); ?>
I wouldn’t normally bother to publish something like this, but the attitude that John Burns, Monster’s Business Development Manager in Ireland is shocking, and I think is worth drawing attention to.
To summarise what happened, Monster.ie harvested a list of email addresses of members of IT@Cork members and used it to send an unsolicited, spammy mail to. He then tried to “recall” the mail (which only works with clients like Microsoft’s Outlook which are insecure enough to accept a request to delete a mail from your mailbox), again exposing everyone’s email addresses by not using the BCC field.
Continue reading ‘Monster.com spams then threatens Irish IT Pros’
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