Category: Technology

Categories
Technology Weblogging

TypeKey scavenger hunt

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

More information about TypeKey and comment management incorporated into Movable Type 3.0 is appearing, but it’s appearing in bits and pieces in certain weblog comments.

In BuzzMachine comments Mena Trott wrote:

Our announcement about the TypeKey service was focused on the TypeKey service, not the way we’ll be handling comment registration. But, without going into too much detail, I will say that we’re not starting this service in order to police or ban users. From a liability standpoint alone, it doesn’t make sense. Movable Type 3.0 has a robust comment registration system that allows the user to ban or accept users on their own weblog. TypeKey is a way to say “this person has an account and has entered a verfied email”–now you, as the weblog owner, will decide how you will handle this commenter.

We operate in California, a state where the legal system advocates personal privacy. We feel the same way, so of course, we’re not going to be providing a public list of all the blogs you’re commenting on without explicit user approval.

And regarding the subpoena issue: While Ben and myself founded Six Apart and the company still reflects our vision, we are a company that has counsel and if and when these situations come up, we follow legal guidelines. This certainly doesn’t mean just handing over user data.

Six Apart didn’t just decide to create TypeKey on a whim. We weighed the pluses and pros of both decentralized and centralized registration. Believe me, the decision didn’t happen overnight. Ultimately, the need to not sign up on every weblog you wish to comment on and the ability to say that your TypeKey identity is your own (rather than having decentralized comment registration where someone could possibly snap up your identity on a particular weblog) were two of the major issues that made us choose a centralized authentication system.

We’re going to want to compile a list of questions that people may have and add those to our FAQ. But, ultimately, we’ll want to get the product out of alpha before answering too many speculative questions 🙂
Posted by Mena Trott at March 20, 2004 03:16 PM

I can respect that Six Apart is in the middle of a development cycle, but the architecture for TypeKey is obviously designed, and the topic has been introduced with just enough information to cause confusion and concern. I’m not sure that waiting to answer questions is a feasible idea for the company. Nor is putting bits and pieces of additional information in some weblogs.

Mena is saying, “Trust us”, and asking us to trust her and Ben because they’ve been a part of this community, and have been helpful in the past, and have provided software for free for many of us. I imagine that many of you know the Trotts personally, and are very uncomfortable when talking about ‘trust’ and ‘abuse’ when referencing them.

But TypeKey is not ‘Ben and Mena” – it’s Six Apart, a company, as both the Trott’s have stressed, that has impacted on their communications and their decisions in the past. A company that the Trotts could decide to sell for a couple of million tomorrow to some major international corporation, and more power to them.

John’s Jottings has pulled together several other weblog entries on MT 3.0 and TypeKey, and it was through his effort that I found out Jay Allen has bought into TypeKey as a solution, and is discontinuing future mt-blacklist updates. As he writes:

When I saw the original feature list, I was highly skeptical that this release would solve the problem. However, SixApart did such a fantastic and elegant job of looking at the problem from a wider perspective that I was instantly won over. This new version completely solves the problem of control over outside submission to one�s blog in such an elegant and powerful way that I myself was astounded.

I can understand Jay wanting to move on – he isn’t paid for mt-blacklist other than through donations. And I’m also not surprised that he would favor a system that would basically prohibit comment posting unless you authorize the person making the comments, and the person has been ‘authenticated’. As with blacklisting, better to lose a few good comments, then run the risk of comment spam or trolls. Which means comment registration and an authentication service, which is TypeKey.

But many of us have never been comfortable with the blacklist feature of MT-blacklist, because as we’ve seen, it was abused and legitimate URLs were added to global blacklists. What we liked, what I liked, was Jay Allen’s nicely elegant email integration for managing comments, and his global comment deletion and entry re-build feature. With enhancements added to throttle the individual DoS (Denial of Service) attacks we’ve suffered from poorly designed comment spam systems, or deliberately from script kiddies, we’ve managed to gain control for the most part on our comments, with only a little effort on our part.

It does sound like some of this has been added to Movable Type 3.0, as I discovered when Ben Trott added a comment to hebig.org/blog:

Hi,

TypeKey is definitely not the only new feature in MT 3–it’s only a part of the release, and in fact, in our original announcement at http://www.movabletype.org/news/2004_03.shtml#000912 it was barely even mentioned.

But as you said, comment registration is not for everyone, and to help out folks who don’t want to use it, we’ve also vastly improved MT’s comment management functionality: you can now look up “all comments by this author”, “all comments from this IP address”, etc, and bulk delete those comments. This is really powerful when combined with comment registration, of course, but even without using comment registration, the tools are much more powerful than in MT 2.x.

With regards to scalability: we’ve now implemented one of the major scalability improvements in TypePad into Movable Type–speeding up the archive list generation by using the MySQL or PostgreSQL processing engine rather than MT.

Finally, as far as features go: another one of the major changes in MT3 is the callback interface, which exposes much more of MT’s internal processing to plugin modules. This allows plugin developers to build large application functionality on top of Movable Type, and we’re hoping to see some really interesting tools get built, because we know that by this point, when there are hundreds of plugins up on http://www.mt-plugins.org/ , there are many people besides Six Apart building interesting things with Movable Type. 🙂

Ben

I think from this we can infer that if you use comment registration in Movable Type 3.0, you have to tie into TypeKey – there is no separate solution.

Of course, I’ve already been talking with another developer about hacking the code to either use locally-based authentication, or no authentication, and I’m sure others are thinking the same – which means we have yet another round of hacked code so that we don’t have to tie into this centralized authentication scheme.

On a MeFi thread, Matt Haughey says of TypeKey:

It seems on the surface to be a sort of weblog-world Microsoft Passport. I once had a chat with the original creator of Passport, face-to-face, and he asked why I didn’t use it for MetaFilter (since it would eliminate a lot of programming for user management). I stated that I didn’t due to security risks, the integrity of the data, and the inherent mistrust of the company behind it. I believe Six Apart has to deal with the same sorts of issues, but I trust their security is tight, I trust that they won’t do evil things with our data, and I trust them as a company.

I think this is a good option for people that are currently turning off their blog comments due to the deluge of spam. If the choice is no comments vs. register with Typekey comments, we as readers and owners win if Typekey is adopted. Heck, I’m tired of deleting the 1 or 2 a day that show up to my open commented Typepad and MT blogs and will seriously consider moving to registered comments only for those blogs.

There is definitely a danger in having a central store of data and taking any actions against accounts in that central store. I hope that Typekey is as transparent as possible in what they do to abusive accounts and why they do it. Of course this is all based on that single info page – perhaps typekey will never ban users system-wide and it will be up to site owners to ban users one by one (though it would be nice if there was a trusted central spammer db like mt-blacklist). But the danger is that if one person is accidentally banned from typekey comments, there could be a lot of problems.

To me, deleting one or two comments a day, especially if the tools are easy, doesn’t bother me. I figured it’s the cost of doing business, and worth it to keep my comments open for those good, but anonymous, comments that come my way every once in a while. As long as throttles are in place to prevent my system from being overloaded and taken down, and I have a good mechanism to clean up my comments, I won’t need or use registration, and hence wouldn’t need TypeKey on my site.

Besides, didn’t I say I wasn’t going to continue using Movable Type? So what’s my problem?

My problem is that TypeKey impacts on me outside my space. If other sites implement TypeKey, and I refuse to ‘register’ with some form of centralized authentication service, I can’t comment in their spaces. If other tools buy into the open API (information of which is only available after TypeKey is released), and incorporate TypeKey into their tools, then the number of sites I’ll be able to comment at, will shrink.

Not only will I, who you can assume is an ‘authenticate’ person, be restricted from joining open conversations on comment threads, but the flavor of comments will begin to change, and I can’t see this as a good thing. It seems to be popular behavior, now, to sneer with disdain at the misfits that clutter our comment spaces. Not surprisingly, another opinion I don’t share, and probably not shared by the majority of people who would like more responses to their writing, not less.

I’m writing a longish essay, which I hope to finish soon (yeah, yeah, so who’s the tease now?), on comments and communication and ‘proper’ behavior, and yes, even incorporating subjects as diverse as Howard Stern and AKMA’s signification and accountability. (Though I am not a philosopher, and usually find when I ruminate on AKMA’s more learned discussions that I’ve found a po’man’s interpretation of the subject matter, and have attached to the bright and shiny thread in the discussion rather than the more complex and hence richer aspects, most likely to the pained reading by one and all.)

In the writing one of the points I hope to make is that even negative statements have their place in communication. Yes, even a troll can serve a purpose, if by trolling they force people into defending what are deliberately provocative statements, weak assertions, and unfounded assumptions. We are in danger of filtering all passion from our interactions with each other. Why have comments if everything we say boils down to the safely, ‘Indeed’, and ‘Indeed not.”

Whether I use Movable Type or not, TypeKey impacts on me. So I continue to push about it. And to be frank, Six Apart does have an architecture in place for comment management in Movable Type 3.0, and I think they really need to provide a detailed look at this sooner, rather than later. Hints and teases, and promises of ‘more later’, are only going to make things worse, rather than better.

In the meantime, if you know of any other weblogs where any member of Six Apart has left comments, please drop me a note in comments, or send a trackback ping to this posting (you don’t have to link me to do this.)

(Morbus Iff has a good comment at his site about the implications of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks against TypeKey:

If TypeKey proves effective, it won’t be able to stand up to a DDOS attack (if Microsoft, Yahoo, and eBay can’t, what makes us think that Ben and Mena will?), and while it runs around figuring out router filtering rules (ha, ha, ha), blogs will be as susceptible as they were before (well, that really depends on MT: if TypeKey is down, will it deny or allow all comments?))

Again, and yes, this is speculation based on what Ben has said, to take it with a grain of salt: but my impression is that TypeKey is used when a person registers with a site, to authenticate that person’s access to comments. I get the impression that it’s not used for every comment, only for the registration process. If true, this would eliminate some of the technical problems – but leave a lot of social issues still unanswered.

But then there’s that ‘login once, comment everywhere’ statement. Gah!

Frankly, mentioning something like TypeKey without being ready to provide details was perhaps not one of Six Apart’s better ideas. Stay tuned for when more information is released.

Categories
Web Writing

A True Title

I am enjoying the comments and suggestions about the book title in the last post, and have directed my editor to have a look. In the meantime, for a bit of fun, I’ve come up with several titles that I’d really like to use for the book:

Internet for people who have been screwed online and are now out for revenge.

Internet for those who invested in the dot-com bubble a few years back, and now want to know why they’re holding worthless pieces of paper.

Internet for those with money…what did you say your name and email address was again?

Internet for people who have a more intimate relationship with an email spammer then their own significant other because they at least get the spammer’s email through all the filters.

Internet for people who are scared by their kids knowledge of the Internet.

Internet for people who are scared by their kids knowledge about sex they gained on the Internet.

Internet for those who want to talk about work online.

Internet for those who are looking for a new job online.

Internet for those seeking a warm, caring relationship online, but will settle for a quick roll in the hay. Or picture of same.

Internet for the paranoid and…wait! Wait! What was that?

Internet for the remaining Howard Dean supporters…all two of you.

Internet for Mom, Dad, and don’t tell them about my weblog.

Internet for the censored, spied on, and imprisoned, because the truth will not always set you free.

Internet for the pundits, because you will inherit the Web.

Internet for the meek, because you will inherit the bill.

Internet for people who will not stop clicking on email attachments and whose machines are now a festering bed of evil, with monitors levitating above the desk, and spinning in circles.

Categories
Technology Writing

Leatherwood Tech: Open, share, blog?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The primary focus of Leatherwood Online is on what’s in the pages, not on the technology behind the pages. Moving parts for the site are kept to a minimum and preferably hidden, as much as possible.

Some of the technology is directly accessible by the readers, such as movies, and the forum, but much is behind the scenes: providing ad review sites for the customers and file uploading for the photographers, that sort of thing. After all, trying to send an 18 MB file through the email nowadays isn’t going to make through one filter or another.

Allan is the man behind the user interface and all the page look and feel. My job was to provide help putting together the moving parts necessary for the release, and then help out as we go forward with more ambitious projects. Putting the bits together has been fun at times, considering that Allan is in Tasmania and 17 hours ahead of me in time, but we managed.

“What time is it where you are? Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

“I never sleep, Allan.”

Reminds me of the good old dot-com days.

We’re not into building from scratch. Rather than code any specific component of the overall system, what would happen is that Allan would ask for pecific functionality and I would then shop around at the open source and freeware/shareware sites for tools, utilities, and scripts, usually coded in PHP or Perl. Once I had some good candidates, I install them and test them, and then have Allan try the products. He would either ask for modifications or accept as is and we would load it on to the site.

If there was any user interface to the tool, such as the ad approval pages, that was Allan’s baby. I enjoy playing around with the look and feel of my own sites, but I am not a front-end person.

Now, as new and more sophisticated functionality is added, very gradually, to the site, we’ll continue with this approach – open source as much as possible, small components, specific functionality, and minimum moving parts.

You may have noticed that a weblogging tool is not used for any of the pages; surprising considering that both Allan and I are webloggers. Early on we did discuss using Movable Type, but it was about that time that some of the security and spammer problems started becoming a real issue, and Allan, rightfully so, did not want this kind of vulnerability at Leatherwood. In addition, we weren’t sure when Movable Type 3.0 was going to be out, and couldn’t hold the work waiting for it. The decision was made to move ahead with static pages, use the forum for reader interfaction, and then look at implementing main category pages such as the Travel page or the Tastes section after the opening, using a weblogging tool. These types of pages are very dynamic and change weekly and a CM tool would be very helpful.

A major decision was whether to go dynamic or static pages. At this time we are looking at dynamic weblogging tools, with functionality provided through PHP/MySQL. Though dynamic pages can be prohibitive with sites that have heavy traffic, we’re not expecting Leatherwood Online to be Slashdotted every day. Well, at least, not right away. Rebuild times, particularly with a page that will allow reader interaction is a concern and makes dynamic paging an attractive alternative. (And as we’ll see later, data caching does allay some of the performance concerns.)

We also picked PHP over Perl, because most of the other functionality at the site is PHP-based. The reason for this is primarily because PHP, like Microsoft’s equivalent product, ASP, is a very readable technology. Though PHP provides enough functionality to meet the needs of most tasks, it’s still very approachable. It’s fairly simple to see what’s happening in the code, and to make alterations and adjustments, even if you don’t have much of a programmer’s background.

If you can use JavaScript, you should be able to program with PHP.

Perl, on the other hand, can be very cryptic and hard to follow even for very experienced programmers. In fact its claim to fame is that you can code an entire content management system in 20 lines of code or less. But it will be the most complex 20 lines of code you’ll ever read.

Based on these two critera–PHP and dynamic–two weblogging tools we’re looking at are WordPress and pMachine’s new ExpressionEngine. WordPress is open source, and free; Expressengine is closed source and commercial (and has a hefty price tag – 199.00 US for a year of updates, costs after that year can’t be determined from site at this time).

I installed WordPress on my site and created a simplified version of this site, and it only took me about an hour to install and port my posts and comments, as well as re-create some of the look and feel. In addition, I also had some time to look around the code, and it is what I expected – very easy to follow, and quite simple to hack if needed. Best of all, if we did have to hack, and the hack’s a good one, we could work on re-incorporating that hack back into the WordPress source itself, so that it’s accessible to everyone.

I also installed ExpressionEngine, but this time using one of the provided templates that I rather liked. ExpressionEngine has 12 different templates you can use to start your site, but, like WordPress, provides templates that you can alter to suit your needs.

As you can see, both products are nice looking, and were surprisingly easy to install. Both provide support for trackback and comments, categories, multiple authors, and all the goodies we’ve come to expect from a weblogging tool. Most importantly, both provide security to prevent spamming and other problems.

ExpressionEngine has support for a ‘nonce’, which is a generated time-specific value that can’t be easily spoofed and should help prevent automated posting. In addition, it checks specific data points for duplication and prevents it, provides a configurable time interval between comment postings by the same person, trackback throttle, and, most importantly, site registration.

WordPress also has throttling included, as well as member registration. In addition, it has site moderation, which can delay posting of a comment pending approval.

ExpressionEngine makes use of template tags, but WordPress uses direct PHP function calls. However, both products seem to be fairly simple to modify for unique design. I would give WordPress a slight edge in simplicity.

ExpressionEngine is a commercial product and has a lot of bells and whistles, including nested categories, and emoticon support. Just think – all the smiley faces you can possible want. The big thing it has, though, is the ability to create dynamic database fields and have these incorporated into the tool. However, before you start drooling over that one, you have to remember that if you go beyond the traditional weblog data fields, you’re locking yourself into the tool.

WordPress may be a simpler product, but it also provides all you need, and more, in a weblogging tool, including multiple categories. But no nested categories, at least, at this time.

There is one killer difference between the products: WordPress has software to import your weblog tool data, such as pMachine, Blogger, and Movable Type. ExpressionEngine only imports pMachine data at this time. I’m not sure if this restriction is because the creators are still working on imports, or if its because they’d rather not have to deal with Movable Type users porting over and bitching about differences. Hard to say.

Bottom line: if you’re a Movable Type user and you want to migrate your data, ExpressionEngine is not an option at this time. Still, this isn’t a problem for Leatherwood Online because any weblog use at the site would be brand new.

Returning to issues related to dynamic pages. There are a couple of concerns folks have raised about dynamic weblog products that I wanted to address with both tools. The first has to do with search engine friendly URLs for dynamic pages. In particular, since we are webloggers, how will Google treat your pages?

To prevent the Googlebot from overloading a dynamic system, Google does restrict the bot’s activities when it sees a URL such as http://www.somesite.com/index.php?id=2&page=1. Also, URLs of this nature provide more information than you want about your system, and are, to be honest, ugly URLs.

An additional concern for many Movable Type users such as myself, is that we have adapted our weblog pages to be ‘cruft free URLs’, as discussed by Mark Pilgrim. Our pages are organized into sub-directories based on date or category, file extensions removed, keyword or post titles used for titles and so on. If a new tool doesn’t provide the same support, redirection will have to used on the pages, and for some of us that have been through more than one tool migration, that’s probably one redirection too many.

To support search engine friend URLs, modifications need to be made to the .htaccess page to rewrite requests, internally at the web server, from a friendly URL, such as http://burningbird.net/wp/fires/2004/02/09/this-is-a-test-title/, to the actual page request, similar to the above.

ExpressEngine does provide a search engine friendly url, which you can see at the test site. With this, search bots won’t know that the pages are dynamic, and bypass your content. ExpressEngine will also add the modifications for you to the .htaccess file. However, ExpressEngine does not provide the dynamics necessary to match the MT specific URL.

WordPress provides a utility that you can define a URL format and it provides the content to add to the .htaccess file. Simple copy and past. You can modify it, and the rewrite rules for .htaccess to fit your current URL configuration, and you shouldn’t have to need redirects once you port. If you look at the test WordPress site, you’ll see that my individual entries are search engine friendly, and backwards compatible with existing MT entries. Right now, page extensions aren’t supported, but this could be added by a couple of tweaks.

Unfortunately, my own configuration can’t be supported, but that’s more my fault, than any products. I liked using the primary category to define my URLs, in addition to adding a graphic to each item on the main page. However, categories, by their very nature, usually don’t have a ‘primary’ or ’secondary’ status – they just are. In WordPress, there is no functionality to mark a category as primary, and therefore I would have to hack something to get this.

A second aspect of a dynamic page system such as these is caching – caching local versions of just accessed data to make the next request of it that much quicker because it doesn’t make another round trip to the database. This has been an important aspect of major application servers such as Web Logic and Web Sphere, but I saw caching implemented with both WordPress and ExpressEngine.

ExpressEngine caches to a local file and WordPress caches to memory, but both should scale to meet the needs of even high profile sites. With the caching, the typical behavior of a reader – access a main page, access a specific item, comments, then return to main page– should be that much quicker because the data has already been pulled from the database.

So, what’s next. Well, Allan will have to review the products and make his choice on which system to use for Leatherwood, but for my own purposes, I am going to be porting all of my weblogs over to WordPress.

When I wrote Stepping Stones to a Safer Blog what I was doing, in effect, was acting like a human CVS (source code control) system. I was taking code from four different sources and mapping out a step by step plan to merge the efforts without adverse effects.

This type of activity is just no longer acceptable to me. Either I’ll go with a commercial product, and be able to hold the company accountable for the product’s security and reliability; or I’ll go completely open source and be able to not only code what needs to be fixed, but reincorporate that code back into the main product for others to benefit.

Either/or is acceptable, but not this half-in, half-out world of Movable Type. I have a lot invested in Movable Type, and a lot I like about it, but it’s time to move on.

Enough of this tech stuff. Following is another amazing photo I stole from Leatherwood, from a most unusual photo collection of local chefs.

Categories
Photography Technology Weblogging

New perspective

With the help of some very good people, I have been able to re-enable both trackbacks and comments here at Burningbird. Not only this, but later today I will have full and detailed instructions how you can also achieve this better protected state, as well as some patch files that will merge code from several sources into a beautifully coordinated whole.

I would have liked to create one installation file with all you need, but this violates licenses, so patch code it is. However, instructions should hopefully make this as pain free as possible. In addition, I’ll also provide links for optional changes, as well as interesting discussions on crapflooders and comment spammers and other states of the Weblogging Disunion.

More later.

scan0304.jpg

Categories
Just Shelley Technology Weblogging

Goodbye Trackback

A long time ago I started work on a concept called threadneedle, a way to track threads of communication through weblogging. However, when Movable Type introduced the concept of Trackback, I dropped work on Threadneedle because Trackback provided much of the functionality I was hoping for from the original concept.

I loved Trackback. Now when you go to a site, not only can you read comments associated with a writing, you can see who linked to the writing from their own efforts. A little bit of extra functionality and you could follow a ladder of links, hopping from node to node following the conversation through many, many generations. Trackback was my friend.

Trackback is now my enemy.

I received several hundred pings with one of my posts today, courtesy of our favorite crapflooder. The link he used as the source weblog for the entry was from a weblogger who had managed to close this person down at his server. The person was pissed. However, the weblogger who had pissed off our crapflooder had protections in place to stop our friend from slamming him, so he went elsewhere.

Here.

Since the crapflooder, who goes by Dv, couldn’t punish the other weblogger, Geoffrey, he punished me instead.

(You can see a conversation between these two in my comments, starting here. Should delete them, I suppose. It’s become kind of a fascinating study though.)

(Before you even think about putting anything in my comments about IP address, be aware that we’ve gone beyond one static IP a long time ago. No, this person used a proxy to get IP addresses, and the pings originated from many different addresses. )

There are some people who have been working this problem. I’ll link one that I know has Trackback filtering, Jacques Distler (I’m not sure if the other people have Trackback throttling yet so I won’t link them for that reason, not to exclude them). There are no easy solutions to this problem, except for having to break into the Movable Type perl modules in order to add or alter code.

Well, I am comfortable with Perl. However, I am hesitant to make the number of changes to the number of modules and templates in order to get this working. More importantly, though, is that this solution puts the non-techs at a real disadvantage. If they copy modules right and left, one from mt-blacklist here, another for trackback throttling there, when MT 3.0 comes out, they are basically going to have one miserable time upgrading. It is becoming a mess.

Now, I can still make changes and tell the non-techs to ‘wing it’ for now.

“This here is where we separate the Men from the Boys, pardner.”

*ptoi*

“Yessiree Bob. Now we gonna know who got Code, and who don’t. And everyman for hisself.”

*ptoi*

“And, hee, hee, hee, hee, if you little ladies ask real nice, why, I might come over and give you a hand. Hee, hee, hee. If you know what I mean.”

*ptoi*

Well, of course that’s not how it is, other than I’ve been dying to write a scene like that for just forever. No, the technical folks around here are more than willing to share code, and provide help – but they can only do so much. They can’t help every non-tech weblogger who is using Trackback. Not and have any kind of a life.

We need one set of code, one set of fixes, packaged so that all the non-techs have to do is copy the files into their folders.

Of course, while waiting for this event, I am a target and it makes sense for me to make the change regardless of other folks. The problem though is our friend, Dv. You see, the weblogger who’s tangled with Dv told me that if he can’t go for you, he’ll go for someone else connected to you. How does someone connect to you? Well, through Trackback, of course.

So I make a change to throttle the Trackback, and you innocently enough Trackback to one of my posts; you’ve just put yourself right into that big red bullseye.

Of course, Dv probably will get tired eventually and move on, but I’m not going to take that chance. The only alternative I have is to turn Trackbacks off for all my posts. Until there’s a formal fix packaged for distribution that can be applied by techs and non-techs alike, to all intents and purposes, Trackback is broke.

But then, all it’s doing is following the path set by it’s cousin. I’ve been out and about this week, and let’s face it – comments are a mess. I’ve seen sites that use a visual indicator you have to type in exactly or the post won’t go through. This stops the auto-spamming. Unfortunately, it also stops people with visual impairment.

Others are using mt-blacklist, or some version of 2.661, but now these are becoming hacked together, and the code is beginning to resemble what’s left of two cars driven into each other at very fast speeds. But at least it’s easy to tell if you’re running 2.661 – you get this redirect page when you click on the URL. That’s so the comment spammers don’t get Google juice.

But that was yesterday’s problem. What new problem do you have for me today?

I think we’re all getting tired. I was tired earlier this week, but I felt like I’d let people down not keeping up the good fight. But now, I think I have a lot of company. I’m sorry, but there’s no graceful and politically correct way to say this: This is fucking ridiculous.

When I was 19, I roomed with another woman in an apartment in Kirkland, Washington. I ended up going out with one of the guys next door who had just broken up with his girlfriend.

One day, a group of us, a small group, were sitting around drinking beers and making plans for a boat race the following weekend. There was a knock at the door, and when we opened it, two cops entered the apartment. They’d had a call that a wild party was going on in the apartment, and we were all using dope.

Of course, the cops could see that no wild party was going on, and there was no evidence of drug use. In fact, one even said that they wondered if they had the right apartment because it was so quiet when they came to the door. They did a quick look around, apologized, and left.

Years later, I found out that the cops had been called by my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, anonymously. I found out because she’d bragged to one of her friends about it.

What does this have to do with the problem? Not a damn thing, other than when Dv hit today for some reason I was reminded of my boyfriend’s ex and the call to the cops.