Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 
Future Now: New comment spam attack.  Spammers are figuring out how to act badly on blog comment lists.  A.S.K.Pang wonders if he should turn off comments altogether.  I think this is one of the things that registration is good for.  I know there is a reluctance for some people to register and there is also a desire for anonymity.  Unfortunately, anonymity is the haven of the bad actors too.  I guess I am going to be simplistic about this: You want to talk to me, you have to be williing to stand up and speak for yourself as yourself.  Of course, I don't mind pseudonyms (so orcmid speaketh), but something that involves creating an useful association and that can't be conveniently mechanized to suit the spam business model.

[later 2004-05-10: Well, comments have been enabled on the new version of Blogger, and they are working on this site.  I allow commenting by anyone, but the process of gettting to a comment-creation window is a big clumsy.  People may have more trouble with it than spammers, and that is a concern for me.  For all of the human factors and UI redesign that was presumed to be invested, I don't understand the basis for some decisions that were made around usability.]
posted by Dennis at 5/3/2004 04:25:41 PM