A Housekeeping Note

By Eric Richardson
Published: Monday, October 02, 2006, at 02:56PM

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — I just implemented a change in the software that runs this site and even though you shouldn’t see anything different, I figure I should mention it. Since I started blogdowntown about 7600 comments have been posted. Of those about 6100 have been spam. That’s more than 80% of all comments. Needless to say, it’s a problem and it annoys me to no end.

Today I’ve put in place a solution that requires that you have javascript enabled in order to comment. When you click the submit button your browser will go out and ask the server for a “comment code” – basically a key comprised of the blog id, the post id and several random characters. It then submits that code with the comment. The server checks it out, makes sure it matches what it sent, and then lets the comment through.

I did rig this system together myself, though, and that means there’s a decent chance it might just not work. If you go to comment and it fails, drop me an email and let me know. We’ll get the kinks worked out pretty quickly and the result will be a pleasant lack of junk in the “recent comments” section of the sidebar.



Comments

1
eecue writes:

if you see this comments work from Camino on OS X. =]

# on Oct.02.2006 AT 03:03 PM
2
Eric Richardson writes:

Of course you pick the one browser / platform combo I happen to know works…

Well, that’s not 100% true. During development I tested Firefox on Linux as well. Seeing as the tricky bits are server-side I’m fairly confident they’ll all be ok, though.

# on Oct.02.2006 AT 03:12 PM
3
christopher writes:

im on xp using firefox. excellent little idea. im on blogger and i’ve never had a problem, but i do use the captcha function.

# on Oct.02.2006 AT 03:57 PM
4
christopher writes:

and this is on osx using safari.

# on Oct.02.2006 AT 04:01 PM
5
mike writes:

This is from Firefox on Mac OS 10.4.8.

Thanks for taking the time to hack this script together–if I haven’t bought any H3rb@l Vi@gr@ yet from those jerk-offs, I’m probably not going to in the future, either…

# on Oct.02.2006 AT 11:10 PM
6
Curt Gibbs writes:

I was always curious as to how you were handling your comment spam. Sites such as LAobserved removed the comment feature for this very reason.

# on Oct.03.2006 AT 02:01 PM
7
Jon Dick writes:

If this works its fine on an Intel Mac, Os X, firefox.

# on Oct.19.2006 AT 05:03 PM

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