Recently in Site Issues Category

So, my buddy Jack recently did some fiddling on the Simple Tricks back-end to try and stem the uncontrolled flood of spam that forced me to shut down the comments back in July. I quietly switched them back on a couple weeks ago, just to see what would happen. I'm still not entirely spam-free, but whatever Jack did has knocked it down to something I can live with, at least for the time being. I still have to manually weed out garbage comments every couple of days, but the upshot is, hey, comments! Not that I've provided much grist for conversation lately, but if anyone has anything to say, now you can.

You'll still have to go through the whole sign-in rigmarole, I'm afraid, but I'm told that ought to be working better now as well. If you have any problems with it, let me know (jason at jasonbennion dot com). I look forward to getting the conversation going again!

When the Movable Type software that underlies this blog got upgraded a few months ago, I was hopeful that one of my most persistent and maddening problems -- an unrelenting flood of comment spam -- would finally be a thing of the past. Sadly, no. The sick bastards who create that shit must've had a uproarious laugh at my naivete. Their effluent started trickling back in within a few days of the upgrade. While my friends struggled to figure out how to navigate the new sign-in protocol, the bots were somehow slipping right past the hurdles and creating fully authenticated user identities for themselves, from which they could spew their annoying garbage with impunity. Yes, that's right: several of my Loyal Readers still can't leave a comment to save their own lives, but the spammers are able to set up pre-appoved accounts and publish their crap instantly, without even being held for moderation. And, just like it did before, the amount of spam I've been receiving has been inching up day by day. I've just spent several hours this evening manually clearing out a couple thousand phony comments accumulated over a mere two-day period.

It isn't just the volume of spam that's increased, either. The actual spam messages themselves have gotten larger, too; many of them are very, very long, essay-length strings of badly translated Engrish that appear to be masquerading as a some kind of epic folk tale but ultimately come down to a shill for knock-off designer shoes, or some damn thing. Sometimes the bots don't even bother with the translation, and leave behind a big block of Chinese characters. At least I know where this shit is coming from, I suppose. But due to the way my back-end blog interface is constructed, I end up having to do a lot of scrolling to get past these huge tumorous things just so I can mark them for deletion. Sometimes I'm able to delete them in batches, which speeds things along, but just as often, the spammers publish a single message from each of a hundred identities, so I have to take them out one at a time.

Well, tonight I've reached the end of my rope. Again. The whole time I was wading through this stuff, removing it from my sight click by tedious click, I kept hearing a line from the classic Cold War movie WarGames: "After very careful consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks." Indeed, sir, indeed.

I'm still hoping to find a solution to all this. A couple of helpful people have asked why I don't install a Captcha module, one of those things that ask you to re-type the characters you see in a little box in order to prove your humanity; others have suggested I abandon Movable Type and migrate Simple Tricks to another blogging platform altogether. Unfortunately, neither of those options work for me, for various reasons. (The Captcha thing is especially frustrating. I know that system works well for those who have it, but for some ridiculous reason, Movable Type -- at least the instance of it that I'm dealing with -- isn't set up to work with it.) So in the meantime, I've come to the unhappy decision to once again just shut down commenting altogether. As I'm sure I said the last time, I really hate to do this. The conversation with my friends and readers has been one of the great pleasures of having a blog. But I just can't put up with this anymore. Lately, I've been spending more time dealing with spam than actually blogging.

I don't know... maybe it doesn't matter. There hasn't been much conversation in a very long time anyhow. The last legitimate comment I received was over a month ago. And as much as I hate to say it, blogging itself seems to be on decline. Out of the little circle of non-professional bloggers I've enjoyed reading, only the indomitable Jaquandor still seems to be producing with gusto. Even my own habits have slacked off in recent months. I really hope I'm wrong, because blogs and blogging have been a pretty big deal to me over the past decade, but maybe it was just another passing fad whose time has come and is now rapidly going. Like I said, I just don't know. And right now, it's late and I'm tired and frustrated and more than a little depressed about all this, so I'm probably not thinking too clearly anyhow.

If anyone out there would like to talk to me about something I write here, I invite you to send a message to jason (at) jasonbennion.com. You can also find me on Facebook, where I post links to every entry that appears on this blog. I know these options are sub-optimal, but they're the best I can offer at this time...

Hey, kids. You may have noticed the time lag since the previous entry has been a bit longer than my usual absences. Sorry about that. Unavoidably detained, as the stiff-upper-lipped might say. Tut, tut. Or some damn thing. The truth is, I had a pretty lousy week last week, starting with the tree-fall I mentioned in passing the last time we were all here.

Hey, kids, I just wanted to acknowledge that I am aware there are still issues with the comments. I've received complaints that people are having trouble signing in using their Yahoo and Google identities (even if they've previously done so successfully), and a couple days ago, one of those weird URL string-thingies popped up in place of a commenter's name again. I have no idea why this isn't all working more smoothly, and I apologize to any Loyal Reader who's had a problem.

For now, until Jack and/or I can figure this out, I've decided to disable the Google and Yahoo registration options altogether. This means a few of you may no longer be able to sign in; again, my apologies. If you have a problem, just go ahead and create an account here on my host server. In fact, I strongly urge all of my Loyal Readers to do that, since that option seems to be the one that's working best. It's quick and painless and asks for no more information than the commenting feature on the old platform did. I believe you'll get a confirmation email after you register; don't forget to follow the instructions it contains. Once I get all the regulars set up and "trusted," I hope we won't have to talk about this anymore. And I also hope all the hassle hasn't put anyone off...

I just wanted to highlight something Jack said in the comments of the previous entry (did you catch that? I said "in the comments!" Yay! Such a sweet sound...) in case anybody missed it:

As an additional note/caveat, you must have a profile defined for the Google and Yahoo authentication to work.

You may also setup a local blog account with standard email authentication. There's a "Sign-up" linky-dink in the bottom right corner of the the credentials window.

If any Loyal Readers who've already checked in have any discomfort about using their Google or other accounts, feel free to set up a new, local one. On the plus side, doing that will let you choose a new username, if you're not wild about the one you've got. This may be especially handy if the one you have is just a big long string of code. I'll even delete the previous comments made under another identity, if you wish. Just let me know. (I'm probably overthinking this/making too damn big a deal about it, as I usually do. Feel free to let me know that, too, if you must.)

Anyhow, I promise this will be the last word on commenting for a while, unless something comes to my attention that's not working. Do as you please, Loyal Readers, and I'll quit trying to direct you. The next entry will be back to the usual drivel...

First, welcome back everyone! I'm delighted to find that my Loyal Readers (at least the vocal ones) are still out there!

Now then, it appears that the new commenting system has a few bugs, as a number of you have mentioned problems with signing in, especially those who tried to use your Google and/or Yahoo! credentials. Webmaster Jack has done some work tonight and reports that the registration system ought to be working now as far as signing in goes, although he still doesn't know why some people's usernames are appearing as big long URL/code strings. I am, of course, completely clueless about all of it and will take his word for it.

In any event, one of the cooler things about this new platform is that allows me to "trust" regular commenters so your remarks no longer have to be held in moderation, i.e., you should be able to make a comment and have it immediately appear. At this time, the following regulars have been so approved:

• Puffbird
• Jaquandor
• Burlaki.com
  
• Ilyuha
• CrankyRobert
• KonstantinB

(Brian, I figured there wasn't much sense "trusting" you until we can get the username issue resolved. Nothing personal... )

So, you folks in the list above, please do my a favor by signing in and saying something, then letting me know if anything happens that looks like it shouldn't happen. Thanks for your support, and hopefully we'll have this all running smoothly in the next few days...

Hey, kids, you may have noticed that there've been a few changes to Simple Tricks and Nonsense. My webmaster Jack finally found the time to do that long-awaited upgrade on my blogging platform, so I'm now running MovableType v.5 (I was on 3-point-something before). The most immediate differences are a new back-end interface for me (which I'm still trying to sort out), and the rather minimalistic new aesthetic for you folks on the other side of the screen. I intend to do some tinkering over the next days, trying to get the hang of the new software and tweaking a few things, so don't be alarmed if you see content coming and going, or rearranging itself. (I need to do something with these sidebars, if I can figure out how; I want my calendar back, and I can't imagine that tag cloud thingie ever having much utility, and I'm even toying with getting rid of the categories, if I can figure out how.)

But the thing I imagine my Loyal Readers will be most interested in and excited by is the return of... commenting!  Yes, once again we can make this place a virtual salon of witticisms and fascinating back-and-forth... with one difference from before: you've now got to register in order to prove yourself real enough to talk to me, and not a worthless golmonging spambot. I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure of how this registration process is supposed to work, although the system apparently accepts logins from a variety of blogging platforms and web portals. So if you've got a Google or a Yahoo or a LiveJournal identity, those things all ought to work here to get you into the commenting queue. Anyhow, give it a try and if you have problems, shoot me an email at jason at jasonbennion.com, and I'll see if I can figure out what's wrong. I hope this won't prove to be an inconvenience for anyone, but I'm practically bouncing in my office chair for the joy of not having to deal with any more bloody spam...

Comments are switched off again, following the arrival of 500 or so new spam messages in the past 12 hours. And that's with a pretty aggressive filter setting. Just to make things extra challenging, everyone who left comments in the previous entry got filtered into the junk folder, so I had to go looking for the legitimate stuff. Obviously, this isn't going to work.

Sorry, kids. I guess the only hope now is to wait until my webmaster Jack finds the time to do something about this, since I don't have the skills myself. As before, if you want to respond to something, please email me or find me on Facebook...

Grrrrr.

Oh, in case you're wondering, this week's hot spam-driven commodities are apparently porn (big surprise), Schlage Keypad Deadbolts, and Mini Coopers. Now who's actually going to buy a car because they saw a spam comment on some guy's blog? I never will understand this marketing model...

If you were paying attention over the past 48 hours or so, you probably noticed a whole bunch of new entries appearing in and around ones that were already published days or even weeks ago. I probably ought to explain what's going on, and highlight the newly published stuff in case you didn't notice something you might want to read.

Basically, between the bustle of the holiday break, the server outage that kept Simple Tricks offline for several days, and the shock of my coworker Julie's death, I ended up with several entries that never got finished, or at least didn't get finished while they were still relevant. Unfinished entries have been a growing problem for me over the past several years; the Simple Tricks archive is filled with them, and each one of them scratches at me like slivers caught in my jeans. Not a big pain, but a maddening itch that I can't rid myself of. It bothers me that there are all these half-formed pieces of my mind floating around in cyber-limbo, never to see the light of the electronic day. It's largely my own fault, of course... I have more topics I want to write about than time to write them, and in case you haven't noticed, I tend to get long-winded when I'm on about something I really care about. Which means that I usually run out of time on longer pieces... their sell-by date passes, or I get diverted by something that I figure I can dash off quickly before returning to the earlier item, only I never get around to returning... you get the picture. One of the worst things about blogging as a medium is this sense that it's constantly in motion, like you're rolling down a neverending highway with new sights forever appearing on the horizon in front of you; if you don't manage to make note of something while it's still ahead of you -- or at least alongside you -- it passes behind you and it's gone.

Well, I'm tired of abandoning topics that I think are interesting or important or well-written or whatever. So I just decided, "Screw it, all these entries from the past couple weeks are going to have their day." And so I finished them and published them. They may be out of date, but they're out there.

And just in case anyone but me gives a darn, here they are, all these back-dated but fresh-to-the-world bits of blatheration that I worked on all weekend long:

• A Real Christmas Story
• Good Riddance, 2010
• The Longest Day
• And Then There's This
• Doctor Who Series 6... Now with More Utah!
• Rumors Confirmed

(As an aside, isn't this the height of narcissism? "Here, let me show you the stuff you might have missed, because every word that drips from my keyboard is a precious treasure that you must not miss." I know, I know, totally lame, but there's not much sense in actually finishing and publishing a bunch of posts if nobody realizes they're there.)

As long as I have your attention, let me note that I'm going to try turning the comments back on and hope the damn spammers have gone off to pester fatter targets. It's gotten very lonely around here, so if anyone is still reading, please say hi and let me know...

Just a reminder that I've turned off the commenting feature due to those golmonging spam-bots ("golmonging" being a highly technical terms utilized by Lloyd Bridges in the original Battlestar Galactica, naturally). If you'd like to respond to anything I've written or otherwise contact me, you can send email to jason AT jasonbennion DOT com. I can also be reached on Facebook.

For what it's worth, I really miss the conversation around here...