Dan Miser - Preventing Comment Spam

Monday, January 17, 2005

Sorry to do this, but the spam was getting to be too much (at least 7-10 per day), so I went ahead and password protected the ability to post comments. It seems pretty unobtrusive to me, but if you have major complaints with it, please let me know, and I'll keep digging for a better solution. I really value the feedback I get here, and I don't want to lose it, but I also have to balance that out with making my life easier by not having to delete a deluge of spam.

For those of you that are interested, I ended up using Miguel Jimenez's approach to solve this. I had some initial problems viewing my blog in a browser after implementing this, but it sounds like my ISP fixed that by adding specific permissions to that DLL. One other note: add the httpHandler section BEFORE the .Text entry where they try to take over verb="*" and path="*", otherwise you will never let the HIP generator get processed.

All in all, I would say that the entire upgrade was rather easy. Now let's see if my spam problem goes away.

Monday, January 17, 2005 9:15:00 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

Tuesday, January 18, 2005 1:10:00 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

Dan,

How did you add that component below? Is this an updated version of .Text. /Is/ there an updated version?

Nick Hodges

Tuesday, January 18, 2005 2:02:00 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

AFAIK, there is no real update to .Text. There is the informal update that solves the editpost metaBlog issue that I mentioned earlier, but otherwise, no, there isn't an ongoing effort to update .Text.

As for how I did this, it was pretty simple after grabbing the 1.2 version of the zip file at the page above.

1. Copy the dll to the bin directory of your blog webapp.

2. Go to the proper skins folder that you're using, and replace PostComment.ascx with the one in the zip file (or edit yours to add the extra control)

3. Modify web.config to add the httpHandler (note my comment above about WHERE to do this - it's important!).

That's it. Let me know if it doesn't work after doing these steps.

Dan

Dan Miser

Tuesday, January 18, 2005 5:22:00 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

I tried to post a comment, but it hasn't shown up. Is it a caching issue?

John Kaster

Tuesday, January 18, 2005 5:23:00 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

What happens when you post something with a bad password?

John Kaster

Tuesday, January 18, 2005 5:24:00 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

Oh ... not good. You lose your entire comment and can't get it back.

John Kaster

Tuesday, January 18, 2005 5:25:00 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

I think a little more friendliness is in order. ;) Is the password also case sensitive? This is such a pain to type in I don't really want to test it much more.

John Kaster

Tuesday, January 18, 2005 7:13:00 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

I think this is a reasonable solution however I think that it would be nice it if didn't make used of shifted keystrokes like "@" and "!" etc. Lastly, it can be hard to tell if the letter "z" is capital or not. I've posted this comment twice now and the "z" tripped me up the first time.

Steve Trefethen

Wednesday, January 19, 2005 11:17:00 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

I looked into the comments here, and here's what I found:

1. Losing the contents of the text box is a problem Miguel talked about. I thought if I used ValidationMode = PersistMode.ViewState, it would work, but I can't get the syntax correct. Any ideas? (Nick, Steve, I'm looking in your direction!!)

2. The characters that are being used are not flexible in this release. They use private consts, so I don't really know how to stop the special chars from being used unless Miguel exposes the functionality.

If anyone knows of another way to do this, I'm willing to try.

Dan Miser

Wednesday, January 19, 2005 5:59:00 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

Got it working on my site. Thanks Dan.

Nick Hodges

Thursday, January 20, 2005 5:29:00 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

Wanna follow my lead, Dan? Check out my site. Mine's just numbers.

Chee Wee

Comments are closed.