Over in the discussion at hyperorg that waqs referenced by El Stein-F David ‘Small Pieces Loosely Joined’ Weinberger notes that tips two and three (rename mt-comments.cgi, hide comments links) didn’t work.

Did Jay release yet? Not as of noon, apparently.

Killing Comment Spam Dead – Jay Allen begins to tackle the comment spambots that have cropped up targeting MT blogs with great frequency over the past few days.

However, thank god, he notes wait until Monday to tackle this, as he’ll be releasing a plugin.

James Seng has released a captcha plugin, which I will implement, I think.

(UPDATE: be warned, this is a VERY hackish plugin, to the point I’m not sure it should really be considered a plugin as such. You’ll need to have libgd installed, which I accomplished via these instructions, using fink.)

(UPDATE II: fiddlesticks, a combination of outdated instructions and having to try to adapt CPAN to look for fink-based instals makes this into an overly-involved install, so I’m aborting. Man – GD, ImageMagick, netpbm – can’t we all just get along?)

Another approach is to hack the default names of the comments scripts, and replace them with a spambot trap that automagically adds any IP address to an .htaccess file when the trap CGI is hit by the bot. The drawback here is that old Google links to a given comment would lead to the trap; and eventually, Google would re-spider the good links; it seems the blogspammers are also scraping for strings based on default configs as well and so might well be able to identify foo.cgi as a renamed comments CGI.

Here are some links and discussions on the topic:

Yoz Grahame: Seven quick tips for a spam-free blog. Summary: rename your commenst script, hack to include a “delete” link in the notification email,
add some misdirection to the form code. Much of this is included in the upcoming MTBlacklist.

Mentalized: Movable Type: Easier edit/removal of new comments. Summary: add a link in the notification email to take you to the edit page for that comment.

Adam Kalsey: Comment spam. Summary: comment throttling, back-end tokenized authentication (I like that!), but does not favor captcha, becasue it violates accessiblity guidelines in its’ simplest deployable form. Adam is also not in favor of content filtering, which is the heart of the MTBlacklist approach.

The Illuminated Donkey missed the Martinez/Zimmer senior-citizen/mixed age qualification boxing match yesterday, it seems. Concurrently, as AZ has noted, the Cubs appear to be headed for the World Series.

(She also noted, a few days ago, a pleasant fall aspect of life in Indiana.)

Surely I don’t need to point out that a leader has arisen in the east, now, do I?

Despite the unmistakable evidence of the imminent eschaton, I called Dr. K-Donk to clear up any miscomprehensions I might have had concerning these events, and now I have a better understanding of at least the ball-base events of yesterday.

What happens when a person having a highly-distinctive worldview decides that an online citation of that worldview constitutes an actionable event?

If you’re Josh Larios, it means defending your publication decision to your registrar, with your domain in jeopardy. Seems to me like it might be a good idea to give Josh some linklove.

UPDATE: Josh yanked the content in full, recognizing it’s never wise to do battle on principle with someone’s scrambled brain chemistry.

I, Cringely gets a nice, fresh redesign this week. Go Bob!

A Librarian Is Making a Big Noise: The Old Gray Lady looks at Nancy Pearl.

Sssssh!

No Safari timeout (posted in April) points to a widget to slap Safari around and cure the stringent 60-second timeout that is inbuilt in the thing.

This comes up because, as increasing numbers of folks are realizing, the default architecture of MT is begining to display an inherent performance limitation as blogs age and the program has to cope with numbers of entries and files in the thousands.

No extra credit will be given for guessing the priority solving this will be assigned chez SixApart.

UPDATE: Okay, so maybe it’ll get discussed. But don’t tell the money boys, kids! It’ll give an existing consumer base one less reason to climb aboard the upgrade if you fix the bug!

buffoonery endorses this lovely little bit o’ flash, a prime slice of Czech surrealism, and I’ll second that.

Mr. Elope may amused to hear that I am experiencing the creeping feelings of entertainment paranoia that accompanied my first season of watching the X-Files as a result of paintover.net and attendant commentary.

AAAnd in other other other news, we’re maybe going to ship on time. I think. Which will be nice, ‘cuz my forearms hurt. It’s times like these when I realize a) working really cuts into my blogging time and b) working at home is so much better than working in-house and c) yet, stable revenue is certainly convenient.

So, this morning, a recap of the John Titor hoo-hah over at Idle Words amused me. In Titor’s case, the idea of using usenet to create participatory fiction online – uh, not the Kaycee Nicole variety – intrigues me, and I think it reflects my lately ranted-on interest in Star Trek bands and the like, and even maybe ties into Sherman Alexie’s bit at the Hugo House this weekend, “D&D Saved My Life.”

So when I stumbled across an interesting Metafilter link that pointed to a corporate info site called Metacortex and pointed out some interesting related sites such as the nearly-complete underwater Greek resort of Aquapolis and so forth, I was amused enough to chuckle and click into some of the sites.

Metacortex, you see, is the company that one Thomas Anderson was working for, several years ago, when all sorts of unexpected things began to happen, involving a movie, then another movie, and soon, yet another movie.

I noticed with interest that the MeFites fingered the project as being in some way related to an online mystery-slash-role playing immersive headbender they referred to as an “A.I.” game. I did not make the connection to the Spielberg/Kubrick film, I just assumed they meant something kind of complex that involved pretending that computers were intelligent.

So I slapped the link in an email to my favorite Matrix fan and went about my bidniss. Hours later, what do I find but a plaintive lament. Said Matrix fan once participated obsessively in the online game that was entitled the Beast and developed at Microsoft by Sean Stewart and Elan Lee, as a marketing tool for the film, one that seems to have somehow escaped the farm, and while seated at a downtown Boston bustop, was finally tranquilized by marketing-campaign control officers.

Fortunately, a helpful link to the Cloudmakers, the ad-hocracy of participants that organized to solve the game illuminates what all the fuss is about, and possibly what the woe will be about.

An apparently Germany-based site has sprung up to begin the coordination process. I think it’s very interesting that the prior game was developed in Redmond, and that the new game’s geographic referral points are to Redland, apparently the home of Metacortex. The telephone numbers, word is, are operable. Call now! Operators are standing by.

ARG forum Unfiction has a slew of boards set up. And here’s a guide, in progress.

Can anyone tell me if Neo appears in the movies at any time wearing a black turtleneck or carrying a certain variety of fruit? One or two of my readers were conclusively identified as working over very near Redland when my site’s referrer logs were subpoenaed under the Patriot Act last Wednesday recently by means too top-secret to be disclosed – what’s the good word?

(Although, despite the 206 numbers, I’m thinking this is NOT running out of MS; the servers are all Apache/Linux, they’re using MT – if this was an inside job that stuff’d be IIS/ASP all the way.)

And in conclusion, I had no idea about Mr. Elope’s past brushes with ARG abuse, or I surely would have held my peace.

Your Dock, if you please (kottke.org) sez Jason, and lots and lots of folks share.

After reflection, I realized that I should actually just post full screeencaps because of the way I have the Dock and other stuff configured.

On my left screen, I have DragThing hidden to the bottom, sliding up when I mouse over a tab; it also runs a process dock down the left side of the screen, and provides me with an old-school desktop trashcan. I also use ASM to bring the old system menu back.

On my right screen, a vanilla Dock runs exposed at all times. That screen is displayed on an aged 21-inch fixed-rez RasterOps monitor, so I use it as my document screen when working in Photoshop or other graphics-oriented apps.

Others have been listing apps, but I’m not gonna; I’d be here all night.

(bonus points for the person that gets the joke in my title for this entry)