A Modest Construct

Maybe because the software is unfinished, maybe because I haven’t configured it right, or maybe just because I was a horrible person in a former life, the spam-blocking software I installed eats ALL comments, no matter if they’re truly spam or actual feedback. For the time being, at least until I figure out how to fix the problem, you probably shouldn’t bother commenting. I’ll let you know if the situation improves.

EDIT:
I’ve finally managed to get Captchas working. I dumped the overzealous SpamKarma and installed AuthImage. What this does is, before anyone can comment, they have to read 6 slightly distorted numbers from a generated image and enter them into an additional field. In theory, spambots can’t read the numbers and therefore can’t submit spam, but there’s no mechanism to get rid of false positives (legitimate comments seen as spam) like there is in SpamKarma, so this should reduce headaches for everyone.

Some bloggers see Captchas as a sort of defeat to spammers, in that their visitors have to change their habits. I think such sentiment is a bit histrionic, to be perfectly honest, in that a simple captcha takes about 5 more seconds to fill out, and therefore doesn’t impose too tremendously upon the visitor. Unfortunately, heuristic filters just aren’t a match for the less user-friendly Turing tests such as this. Maybe we’ll see that change in the future.

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