Let’s try this

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1 October 2003

If all goes well, you should be able to comment on this entry.

Probably the only thing interesting about this is the pre-emptive comment spam prevention. There was a discussion about comment spam over at Jeremy Zawodny’s. Despite objections (they’ll still spam) I like the idea of stripping links — including the person’s homepage link — until a switch is flipped at my end. That way there’s basically no chance of spammers coming in through Google; unfortunately I’ve forgotten the link for that.

Also, the Comment API : am I expected to entity-decode the input? It’s all done apart from that, but that’s a pretty big ‘that’ .

Also also, comment icons (via 0xDECAFBAD). Very cool.

Comments

  1. Er

    Putting the comment form into the templates would have been a good idea, as would a submit button.

    Posted by Sean on 1 October 2003 at 21:31:18.

  2. Testing preview

    Yea?

    Nay?

    Posted by Sean on 8 October 2003 at 20:31:40.

  3. And a way of cookie-ing people

    Why do I think of all this stuff now? I'll do it tomorrow.

    Posted by Sean on 1 October 2003 at 21:37:50.

  4. Icons

    Comment icons? Gordon Bennett, not more stuff I have to actually look at. :-)

    Comment spam is an increasing problem...would renaming form elements help? Or are spammers more sophisticated than that?

    Posted by sil on 2 October 2003 at 0:40:27.

  5. diving for fun and profit

    Now you've enabled it, I've got nothing to say :)

    Comment spam, I used to get a small amount, now I get nothing. This is because I removed myself from google. Drastic, I'm sure.

    Posted by Paul on 2 October 2003 at 13:9:25.

  6. Spam

    Well, I could test it by throwing open comments on all entries...but I'd rather not :-).

    From what I can gather, most spammers are human (not in the sense of having a soul, but in the sense of not being WWW::Mechanize). Renaming the form elements probably wouldn't help in that case, and it would screw up people's autocomplete boxes.

    I like this solution, although I need to code myself a better interface for approving comments.

    Posted by Sean on 3 October 2003 at 16:16:34.

  7. Wow

    The cookies worked first time, both in the dynamic page and the cached version.

    Posted by Sean on 3 October 2003 at 16:17:21.

  8. Whoohoo!

    Nice comments... now I don't have to store up all my comments on your entries until my next email (which is coming, I promise, and I'm veryverysorry for the tardiness).

    You do realise, though, that now you're throwing yourself open to the prospect of being enslaved by your comments? Beware the comments...

    Posted by Cathy on 3 October 2003 at 19:37:14.