Comments are back up.

I took down comments on Sebbo.org right before heading for Burningman since I knew I wouldn't be available to hand-prune the thickets of comments spam that were twining around every post here. I made a vague promise to "do something" about the problem shortly after getting back.

Or, rather, I deactivated comments. The web apparatus for posting the comments was still there--they just didn't show up.

Six months later, I finally added a one-line hack that I think should keep the spammers at bay for a while. For those who care, it's:

foreach ( @fields) { if (param($_) =~ /<.*>/) {die print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n" . "Die, spamz0r!"; }}

at line 123 of the Writeback plugin.

After I did this, I discovered that the "disabled" Writeback had still been writing all the last six months' spam to disk. It took me almost an hour to hack it all away, attempting to leave the relatively paltry number of actual comments intact.

Now, however, things seem to be working. I expect to add more, better, and mo' betta features to my comments system in the next week or so, but at least I have something again now.

NOTE TO SEBBOFEED READERS: LJ's comment system is great, but it deletes syndidated articles and all their comments after about a month. A bunch of great discussion has been permanently deleted that way, including Miriam's explanation of using dowel hats to drive off seagulls, Tim's experiences with Bostonian's attitudes toward eccentrics, and that great one about Malaysian prononouns from someone I didn't know. I'm not telling you shouldn't comment at Sebbofeed, but it is writing on sand.

[/diaries/diary/geek/site/] 4 comments