Registrations

I’ve turned off registrations for commenters for a bit until I can figure out a reliable longer-term solution. Getting 20-30 spam registrations a day now. If you’re inspired to comment on a post and you’re not a registered user, please be patient and I hope to have something figured out soon. If you’re already a registered user, you should be able to comment still.

Update: I should have been clearer. The problem I’m having is with tons of fake/spammer user registrations, not actually spam comments. So I’m going to try something new: commenters on articles do not have to register as users. Way back when I moved to WordPress, it seemed to me that forcing commenters to register was a great way to manage spam and also keep the comment section from becoming too great a hive of scum and villainy. But that was before some of the plug-ins that have appeared since. So I’ll cross my fingers and see how it goes this way.

Update 2 Well, hilarious, in its own way. Within two hours of posting the last update, my first spam comments to get through the plugins in a while.

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4 Responses to Registrations

  1. Greedo says:

    Everybody is again scum and villainy, but Han shot first and he’s the hero.

  2. Leslie M-B says:

    The problem may be that there’s a big discussion right now on some internet marketing forums about the value to search engine results of links from high-page rank .edu blogs. Marketers are sharing instructions on how to find .edu blogs that allow anyone to comment, and because Swarthmore.edu has a PR of 7, I imagine your blog is a pretty attractive place to post comments with links (apparently now both nofollow and dofollow links are attractive to marketers these days).

  3. Timothy Burke says:

    Yeah, we were talking about that here as well. It’s clearly the .edu that’s attracting the swarms of user registrations. Probably will attract spam comments as well.

  4. Rana says:

    My reaction to the changed commenting system? Bless you, sir, bless you. I have a terrible time with WordPress every time I come here – it doesn’t remember me, it sends up a sign-in form that my browser can’t auto-fill the password on, and it doesn’t allow you to set your own password, so any time I wished to comment here, it required digging around in my mail files or a total reset.

    Now, it may be that this discouraged me from leaving flip comments and only writing ones that were worth all that effort, but I feel such a relief knowing that I can now respond when ideas are fresh in mind, not poorly remembered some twenty minutes later.

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