Recent Activity and spam

You’ll be pleased to read that the Recent Activity page is now back. Sorry it’s been away for so long, but my time is short at the moment.

An unfortunate side effect of the recent upgrade to Movable Type seems to be that suddenly more spam is getting through in annotations (and on the comments on my other sites). I’m not sure why this is at the moment, but I’ll keep my eye on it and delete them as soon as I can. The next (very imminent) update to the software promises a new method of stopping spam, and there are other things we could try, such as requiring people to log in before posting annotations.

If you see any spam that’s older than a day or two, please do let me know, otherwise assume that I’ll remove it when I’m next online. Thanks for your patience.

Comments

• N cgs on Wed 25 Jun 2008, 03:46pm. Flag this

  Thanks for the hard work.

• N language hat on Thu 26 Jun 2008, 01:34pm. Flag this

  I add my thanks!

• N Mary on Fri 27 Jun 2008, 04:25pm. Flag this

  It’s great to have the ‘Recent Activity’ function back again: we really missed it. Many thanks, Phil.

• N Michael Robinson on Mon 30 Jun 2008, 10:42am. Flag this

  suddenly more spam is getting through in annotations

  Thanks also.

  However given the content of much of the spam I cannot help but think the spirit of SP lives still — given his botanical and other extra-marital activities and with the web sites now available goodness knows what sites SP might have visited and spam his own machine may have attracted: a contemporary version of the Diary would, I imagine, have many references to his Navy Office colleagues dissipated tastes, probably Batten, causing problems with the office computer network and systems; with, of course, complaints about the webmasters blocking of certain sites and Sir John Minnes inability to use Excel properly, or at all …

• N Jens on Thu 10 Jul 2008, 02:05pm. Flag this

  Regarding the spam problem: Did you look into using the Akismet plugin? It works wonderfully on my blog - for each spam comment that gets through, there are literally thousands that get caught. (Then again: Most of my legitimate comments are in German and most spam is in English, so it may be easer to tell them apart on mine than on English-speaking blogs.)

  Anyway, thanks for the great service, it’s a pleasure to read the diary like this.

• N Phil Gyford on Fri 11 Jul 2008, 09:01am. Flag this

  Jens, yes I was using Akismet before but when I upgraded Movable Type I accidentally forgot to copy across one of its files and so it very quietly stopped working. I’ve now replaced it with TypePad AntiSpam which some say works even better than Akismet.