Even though I’ve used Geeklog for over three and a half years, and use it for other sites as well, I decided to convert my personal blog over to Wordpress this past week. I’ve been playing around with Drupal as well (which I quite like), but really what I do on this personal site doesn’t really call for something with that kind of horsepower. This site is not about a community sharing information and creating content, this is about my ranting and raving about stuff that goes on day to day. It’s more of an online journal than anything else.

One of the reasons that I decided to change platforms had nothing to do with what the software could or could not do at all. It had to do with frustration, plain and simple. I was sick, and not able to do much more than sit on the couch and tap the keys. I had sinus troubles and I would get dizzy when I stood up, so I didn’t do that very often. Having the computer on my lap most of the day I was struck by how persistent some spammer had gotten too. I was getting two or three spams an hour! But these weren’t just mass emailed spam, this was some ‘bot hammering my registration script - automatically trying to get registered to the site so it could post it’s payload of links back to some porn site all over the place. Since I had long ago set the registration to approved only, of course this didn’t get the bot anywhere, but it was annoying me.

One of the reasons it annoyed me so much was that it was freaking stupid: instead of registrations coming in with names like ‘John Smith’ and a boring email address, the hundreds of registrations were all like this:

Edit gautama2192 gautama2192@realitypornhouse.com
Edit raffia9545 raffia9545@onlygaybutts.com
Edit smalley1310 smalley1310@webcam-home.com
Edit holmes5752 holmes5752@onlygaybutts.com
Edit VintageSlots Dave@IBuyOldSlots.com
Edit decapod2236 decapod2236@orgy-reality.com
Edit tristan_kael dkxbde@oasisproductions.net
Edit showmen4688 showmen4688@orgy-reality.com
Edit kalki_kelly xpoacn@wsscsw.com
Edit ingersoll1220 ingersoll1220@orgy-reality.com
Edit jennings9290 jennings9290@topasianporn.com
Edit toilsome1725 toilsome1725@realitypornhouse.com
Edit infertile8222 infertile8222@topasianporn.com
Edit anything6470 anything6470@realitypornhouse.com

It doesn’t take much effort to realize that someone with an email address from orgy-reality.com is probably not interested in serious discourse on your blog, but I imagine most sites are set up to handle the registration process automatically so there’s no human eyeballing these submissions. An offensive and suggestive email address is much like any other to the machine. I could have chosen to blacklist the various domains (there were a lot submissions from only a few domains), but it seemed like I was playing whack-a-mole when I attempted to do that. The blacklist would work for a while, but then they’d come up with a new domain (domain names are cheap) and you’d be doing it all over again.

I decided to implement CAPTCHA on the registration form. CAPTCHA is method of displaying a little graphic with letters like the one’s you’d see in ransom notes in the movies, hard for a program to decode but easy for a human to decipher and type in to confirm that they were really a person. This immediately eliminated the spam of that type, but I couldn’t (in my debilitated state) for the life of me figure out how to implement this on my ‘contact’ form. I had a link on my old site which allowed a websurfer to email me through the site. It didn’t reveal my actual email address, it just presented a form for them to use. Somehow another ‘bot was using that form and sending me another two or three emails a day using that too.

I was tired. All I really wanted was to write some stuff and hit ’save’. I didn’t want to play this stupid game anymore with Mr. porn hustler bot. Instead of hobbling my now almost totally closed down CMS system (I had been turning off one feature after another over the years due to spam), I figured I would just try Wordpress. I installed it on my laptop in under 5 minutes, it has a really simple plugin interface, it uses php which I had become familiar with through playing with Geeklog over the years, and the themes administration was awesome. Wordpress doesn’t do everything Geeklog could do, I could never replace my work intranet system with Wordpress, for instance - but for a personal blog system it was more than adequate.

If you haven’t been around here in a while, please try out the new site - maybe you’ll like interacting here better now that some of the basic functions you expect from a blog are present - like being able to see the post you are replying to while replying! It took Geeklog years to get on the stick with that one.