The Black Republican

Most people probably aren't aware of it, but we here at TBR have continued to have problems with pernicious spam. Happily, even the other contributors probably are unaware of that, because MT's newest upgrade has kept almost all of it off the blog and in the mechanism's moderation system, which only I have to deal with. Unfortunately, I have had the settings for the tripwire into the junk mailbox torqued up so high, we occasionally have lost comments. And since we were averaging about 25,000 junk comments a month, it's only been sheer luck when I've found a good comment amid all the crap - when I've bothered to look at all, which was almost never.

My friend Doug long ago told me to institute a CAPTCHA mechanism, but I could never find an MT plugin that didn't require modification. And unlike the Generic Geek, I'm not really enough of a coder to want to climb inside the php to do it manually (assuming I could figure the code in the first place).

Well, I think I've finally beaten the spammers, because I found a CAPTCHA plugin that actually works relatively out of the box. I had a scare for about an hour while (like every other attempt at CAPTCHA) I was failing to get it to work, and after I found that Arvind stopped supporting his creation. But eventually I got the kinks out and it seems to be smooth sailing so far.

While I was at it, I made a few improvements to the look and operation of the comment and preview templates, including the requirement that all comments have to be previewed before being posted. (This being an extra step against the spammers now that should save me a modification later.)

As always, let me know if you see any problems.