A VERY Important Announcement
Okay, I’ve got the problem licked, it seems. Anyway, I’m leaving registration enabled but optional. If you don’t want to have to retype your information every time you post a comment, you can register and then you have the option of staying logged in.
Original Message:
I hate, hate to do this… but I’m going to have re-enable account registration and make people register to post comments.
For the past week… and getting worse every day… I’ve been getting spam comments (advertisements for porn and propecia, mostly) coming in almost faster than I can delete them. Yeah, they got stuck in moderation like all new posters so you guys never see them, but there’s so many of them that a couple of times I’ve deleted legitimate comments because I didn’t see them in the middle of them. When I caught this too late, I reconstructed the missing comments from the email notification. Of course, getting hundreds and hundreds of spam notifications is also killing my email.
Perhaps worst of all, when a script/bot is generating dozens of comments, that’s using up site resources that a reader could be using. During the worst of the onslaughts, real, living people have been blocked from connecting because there were too many simultaneous connections. Can’t have that.
I know that requiring registration will dissuade some people from commenting, but that can’t be helped. I’m just getting too big to handle the flood otherwise. I know some people are suspicious of registration, but hey… I’m just me, not some shady division of Wal-Microsoft&T, or whatever.
And yes, I’m still working on an update for Wednesday/Thursday. I’m actually very close to being done with it. I simply keep getting distracted by the fact that there’s 50+ spam comments to delete.
Anyway, sorry about this. On the plus side, you won’t have to keep inputting your information every time any more!
EDITED TO ADD:
Oh, fun! Apparently Wordpress doesn’t actually validate that people are logged on when they’re commenting… it just toggles whether or not the fields are available on the page… so the automated scripts which are spamming me bypass this simple precaution entirely.
So, for now, I’ve turned off the requirement for registration. Though, based on a user request, I’m going to leave it as an option… if you don’t want to retype your info every time, you can register. (Link at bottom of sidebar on the right.)
And now I’m going to hack together some stuff to make sure all comments are actually coming from the form and not a script. I’m 2500 words into a chapter and I don’t know if it’s going to go up before I have to go to bed. This is some fun, folks.
