Spam, Plugins & Features

Okay. As I said before, I was looking into new plugins, and as long as I was trying new antispam plugins, I figured I’d try the new, improved Crosspost to LJ plugin. See, I have an RSS feed on LJ, but if people comment over there, I never see it. This way, assuming it works as desired, I can get comments there or here, without any trouble, though anon commenting is still off at my LJ. (Email notifications are love…not to mention easily sortable ) Also, I decided to try one of those social bookmarking plugins, to see if that improves my traffic at all.

If you’ve been unable to comment because of the antispam measures before, I’ve relaxed the restrictions (Akismet tells me it’s deleted 4 messages as spam without letting me see what they were - I set it to let me look at them now) and removed Bad Behavior (which was what was causing Seamus so much trouble, and might be the reason I’ve had crickets chirping over here for the last several months). I’m cautiously relaxing the restrictions on pingback/trackback, too, but moderating all of those, because my previous WP installations got absolutely hammered with pingback/trackback spam. I’ve never understood the mindset behind spam. Seamus sums it up perfectly: Such a mamoth [sic] waste of everyone’s time and energy for just a tiny bit of money for a miniscule number of people.

I mean really. Does anyone actually buy any of that stuff? I’d refuse to buy from a spammer just on principle.

The new user registration with no comments is weird, and probably just spam registrations anyway, but the silence is a little unnerving. I know that I have some readers, though Certain People prefer to let me know in person or by phone what they think of my posts (Arian & DFL, I’m looking at both of you ) rather than commenting on the page.

I know I need to start posting a little more regularly, and I will, but RL does get in the way. I still haven’t fixed my theme yet, because my *&^#*$%*&%^ cable connection went out while I was trying to sort out what files were still on my host where they belonged, and I worked a lot later tonight than originally planned. And yes, I’m aware that it’s last night, now, but as I haven’t gone to sleep yet, it still counts for me. Ah, the joys of being practically nocturnal. Actually, it’s pretty nice, because everyone else goes to bed and leaves me alone with my computer. Anyway, I’ve decided that this is as good a time as any to do a complete theme overhaul, since the glitch forced the issue, so it could be a few days before I’ve got it polished up nice, but it’ll probably be very different when I’ve finished.

Originally published at Chrystalline. You can comment here or there.