People leaving a comment who had never loaded the page they were commenting on.<\/em> I had to get rid of Bad Behavior a while back because it began eating a ton of CPU cycles. I have no idea why. It had worked fine prior to that. But whatever. I disabled Bad Behavior over a year ago. <\/p>\nBut now Akismet has flipped out. The plugin keeps complaining that it can’t reach the website. It then throws suspicious comments into moderation, where I end up seeing them. Gah. I forgot how vile this stuff is. It’s actually really bad for me personally. There is something about having anonymous strangers try and use my personal blog as a place to sell child porn that will fill me with ragemurder juice. So for the past couple of weeks I’ve been seeing that rotten stuff mixed in with your comments, which has really been taking the fun out of this site for me. <\/p>\n
(Other major spam type: Replica handbags. Hear that spammers? REPLICA HANDBAGS! YOU WISH YOU HAD MY SEARCH RANKING YOU FEEBLE PARASITES. People looking for REPLICA HANDBAGS CHEAP will end up on MY site before they find YOURS, you tick on the ass of the internet!)<\/p>\n
Anyway. Akismet sort of half-fails in this goofy way, and I think it was trying to reach the server every single time someone tried to load the page. It would connect eventually and clean out spam in batches, but doing things this way was giving the site a case of the slows. <\/p>\n
I tried turning off Akismet and had thirty spam appear on the site in the space of ten minutes. (Imagine what that would look like after an eight-hour sleep. I’d spend the first hour of every day removing spam. It would feel like checking my email in 1997. Ugh. THAT was an ugly period.)<\/p>\n
So now we’re trying “Growmap”. It’s just a checkbox. The thinking is, your average spambot is probably configured to blindly submit comments to high-ranking WordPress pages without bothering to load or look at them. It won’t check the checkbox, and so the comment will be rebuffed without needing to pass through any of the software layers I’ve listed above.<\/p>\n
So that’s where we are. Let me know how the site is working and how the new checkbox works. Also let me know if you’re looking for replica handbags. No, actually don’t. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Short version: You now have to check a checkbox to leave a comment. This may or may not be a permanent change. I’ll be monitoring this new system over the next couple of days to see how well it works. In the meantime, please provide checkmarks along with your comment to placate the untrusting computer. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[41],"class_list":["post-17844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notices","tag-spam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17844\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n
<\/td><\/tr><\/table>I used to have another layer, which was a plugin called