The Spam Problem on This Blog Just Disappeared

The Workbench weblog is running my own software, implemented with PHP and MySQL in higgledy-piggledy fashion over the years. I just added functionality that can hide all new comments until they are approved by a moderator.

During the blogging boom there were boisterous discussions on many of the posts here, so I didn't want to gum up the works. Every comment went up immediately.

These days, 99 out of 100 comments are spam. I've been manually getting rid of them after they are posted, which often means they spend one or two days on a post before the spam is deleted and submitting IP address banned.

Now, nobody gets a comment on Workbench until I've seen it first.

I took the time to do this because I want to blog more. A big motivator is that Elon Musk is burning Twitter to the ground, but the bird site was already a place that was taking more out of me than I was getting back. There are a couple hundred people I like to communicate with on Twitter and thousands more I'd like very much to never hear from at all, including exceptionally terrible people like TERFs, COVID deniers and Kari Lake.

Twitter is like a wedding reception where every table has some of your friends but you're required to share it with somebody's racist uncle.

Twitter · Spam · Web Publishing · 2022/11/18 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Comments

Trox/Flannelenigma has entered the chat. Hi rcade!

#1 · Tim Truxell · 2022/11/18

Can't wait until Horsonovich comes back!!

#2 · Michael · 2022/11/20