drupal

The Perils of Overzealous Spam Combat

spam combat gladiators!In case you never noticed, there's a 'Recent Comments' column in the sidebar, and the more astute among you will realise that my comment has been sitting at the top of the pile for quite a while now. At first I thought it was just my readers being polite and staying silent while I ranted and raved about hot army women, haunted dream homes, and the unsexiness of the modern caveperson. But, pretty-much every reader of this blog is a blogger themselves, and we're a chatty lot. It was unusual to have no comments for weeks.

I decided to test the system out, and lo and behold, ran across a host of problems, all of which had to do with a malfunctioning captcha system (a 'captcha' is a test to find out if you're a human and not a malicious spam program, by asking you to answer a question only a human could) . Hmm, malfunctioning is not entirely right, because it seems to have been behaving a little too well.

Captcha-ing the Spammers

I get a fair amount of spam on this site; less than most, but significant enough to be a problem. Most of it is trackback spam which, by design, isn't an easy thing to combat, but Drupal does a decent job of things.

Comment spam, on the other hand, has been giving me a headache or two, and not in the way that you think. You see, Drupal does catch most if not all of it, but it also overzealously picks up real people's comments (and as you can no doubt see, I have far too few of those as it is!), just like my last CMS, Pivot.

allVishal.com Has Been Redesigned!

allVishal.com Redesign Banner

After months of slacking off, I finally got round to doing something I should have done way back in March: I've redesigned the site's look!

When I switched over to Drupal I used the Minnelli template, a default template that comes with the program. Don't get me wrong, it's a very nice and functional template, but being a graphic designer and using a standard template on my own site is a bit... well, shameful.

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