Comment spam
A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that Dan's comment spam problem had gotten pretty bad, so I dropped him a note apologizing for my journal system not doing a better job (or any job, really) of blocking comment spam. I also noted that it was odd that my, Vardibidian's, and Mary Anne's journals almost never got comment spam.
I spoke too soon; within days after I sent that, all three of our journals started getting regular doses of comment spam, though still not nearly as much as Dan's gets.
I have various possible approaches in mind to dealing with the issue, from providing a mass-comment-deletion function to finally switching over to Movable Type (though I realize that MT has its own comment-spam issues). But I figured I might as well implement the quick-and-dirty approach that initially came to mind: I've changed the internal names of the text boxes in the comment-posting form. I'm hoping that the automated comment-spam software isn't smart enough to figure out what an "Ycleption" text box is used for, for example. (I've done this only on my journal for now; if it has a significant effect on spam volume, I'll implement the change in others' journals as well.)
It's possible that the spamming software doesn't pay any attention to text-box names, just fills in every form it finds on a web page. But it does seem to put semi-appropriate values into the various boxes most of the time, so I'm hoping it's tuned to look for certain key words as form-field names.
Anyway, the real reason I'm posting this is to ask that you let me know if you run into any problems posting comments. I've tested the changes, and haven't run into any problems, so I think the change should be entirely transparent to humans. (Except that if you're used to your browser auto-filling the text boxes, that probably won't work the first time you post a comment using the new system.) But for the time being, if you find yourself writing a long comment in my journal, it might be best to copy the comment into some other application before you click the Insert Comment button, just to be sure.
