The Fickle Parrot

No one will care about this post. At all. Please stop reading now.

For a long time, everything found on this site was created by me. It was a fun project I did while I had some down time during graduate school to remind me about web development. It looked okay and I didn’t hate it, but it was just a real pain to maintain. I had put nearly all of my efforts into the front end user experience, as I figured it wasn’t that big of a deal that it wouldn’t be user friendly for me. As a result I just didn’t update it very often. Wordpress streamlines everything for me, which makes it a lot easier to post.

Perhaps equally important is that the comment system on my original site was not very robust. I didn’t spend the time or effort to harden it against automated spam bots. As a result, every day I received something around 100 comments full of links to garbage. I had always prevented html comments by converting all of the special characters into html characters so it was impossible to post links and what not. The automated spam bots didn’t check to see if what they were posting worked, they just posted garbage. Their posts often ended up being full of 20 or 30 lines that looked like this: <a href=”http://garbagesite.com” alt=”get a hot date tonight”>http://garbagesite.com</a>.

To combat this, I just stopped accepting posts that had anything resembling links in them. This cut the spam down a lot at first. Then all of a sudden they seemed to get wise to this and started just posting posts with no intelligible content in them at all. It clearly had no benefit for them as it didn’t even include links people could copy and paste, or Google could pick up. It was just noise more or less. Why would they do this? At this point it became impossible for me to filter for garbage with out a significantly improved filtering system, and I just didn’t have the motivation to deal with it given that I hadn’t received a real comment from someone I knew in nearly a year. So I killed the ability to post comments on my old site.

Now that I’m using Wordpress I can allow comments again, as well as post easily. Let’s see if I actually do that.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 1:24 am and is filed under Coding, Info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.