Saturday, August 18, 2007

No Anonnies For a While

I've temporarily disallowed anonymous comments, so you'll need a blogger account to comment for the time being. Some spammers are putting their questionable pharma sites in their "other" name, possibly hoping I won't notice and the insincere "Great article!" comment won't catch my attention. I've also turned on word verification.

Note for the handful of people who occasionally buy this stuff and make them enough money to justify the small amount of time they use putting up free advertising and wasting a disproportionate amount of my time: The stuff often isn't quality, and sometimes even unrelated to what they label it as. In the case of herbal stuff, it's a crapshoot: It's not uncommon for herbs to lack the active ingredient they were supposed to be grown for. They're environmentally unfriendly most of the time, as many are overharvested from the wild, rather than farmed. They're also commonly immune to most regulations, and can contain heavy metals.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

7 comments:

Maggie Rosethorn said...

I don't mind the word verification or using my google account. The major problem for me is the time limit you have for the verification. If you do it first, then type your google name and password, it times out on you and you have to retype a new verification. Sometimes I am able to do it; other times I have to submit twice. But if it keeps the spambots away, I'll happily deal with it.

O'Brien said...

If it's just spam bots you need to worry about, why not allow anonymous comments? It'll help agents of the Thought Police... I mean, your fellow Goldsteinists... I mean, people to comment without needing a Blogger account, and the word verification should be enough to stop spam bots. Or is it manually-posted spam?

Bronze Dog said...

It's creatively posted with a website link in the "Other" entry for the name. Killing anonymous comments would stop that, and add a step to their process: Click to see their profile, and then the link they want to send you to.

It's most likely just another one of those phases, so this'll probably only last a couple days.

Tom Foss said...

I've been getting a smaller wave of the same crud, but it seems like the notes of their comments are still sticking around in your Recent Comments widget. Make sure when you delete them to hit the "remove forever" box, if you aren't.

Can't say I particularly mind the word verification; Blogger tweaked it with the upgrade to give a longer time limit, so I haven't had many problems with it lately.

JanieBelle said...

Don't mind the Captcha at all, it's the logging into Blogger/Google that bothers me.

Personal vendetta.

Plus if anyone clicks my name they go to my old blog, which is a bummer, but there's a link there to my new one, so that's not a big deal really, and just so y'know, this is in no way a run on sentence, although I'll forgive you for thinking it is just because I'm very kind that way, which is a valuable asset for the aspiring Supreme Goddess of the Universe to have.

Kisses anyways, BD.

PalMD said...

Sorry to hear about the spam. Wordpress captures most of mine, but some slips through.

Monado said...

Someone on the Web has been talking about capturing all those Captcha keystrokes: instead of generating obscure letters, they're going to post images of typescript (books, manuscripts, etc.) that need to be transcribed for the Web. Perhaps they've been optically read as a nonsense word. The results will be fed back into some gigantic "Gutenberg Galaxy" type project. I'm eagerly awaiting my first phrase.