I’ve run into a database error with MT-Blacklist, and until I get it worked out, I have to manually approve or deny comments, and it’s taking up a lot of time. It turns out that spammers totally ::heart:: my blog. It also means that if I’m AFK for an extended time, non-typekey users won’t get their comments added to the site for a loooong time.
So until I get this issue worked out, I’m changing my blog configuration to only accept comments from TypeKey users.
Now, listen, privacy is a big deal with me. Here’s what they say about it:
What about my privacy?
We’re committed to providing a service that respects user privacy. Therefore, we will not publish information that you have not chosen to make public, nor will we share your information without your explicit permission. We’re not in the business of selling email addresses, and we give users the option to choose whether they’d like to send their email address to the sites which they are commenting on.
I’m pretty comfortable using Typekey, for what that’s worth. I don’t mind being held accountable for my comments, either, and I believe that the vast majority of WWdN readers feel the same way. Actually, we’ll see how it goes with Typekey enabled. Maybe it will bring back some of the cool interaction that we used to have here a few years ago.
There’s more information about the service in the Extended TypeKey FAQ, and readers are always encouraged to privately share their thoughts with me via e-mail.
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Hey Wil,
What are you doing with your poor computer? (hahaha-kidding) You all of a sudden have an urge to change and update, huh? I know the feeling as I am about to do the same thing.
Any new news? You get my E Mail by the way? 🙂 You have a great day and be well as always!
Wil,
I watch the reading of JAG at gnomedex and was BLOWN AWAY! Hope you eventually get to Houston!
PS: This is Michael, the guy who emailed you while I was in Iraq. I took my blog down because I had to many wierdo’s emailing me… I bet you dont have that happen often.. 🙂
Haven’t commented too many times here before but the TypeKey thing seems fairly harmless.
Glad to see more frequent updates to the site. I enjoy your writing style and sense of humor.
Since I have recently moved to the world of movable type, I can comment!
I haven’t attempted the upgrade yet. Hopefully mine will go smooth. Though if it breaks, I doubt my two readers would even notice.
See you this Friday Wil!
Have you tried the TM 3.15 update yet? Seems to have a fix associated with spam.
hey wil, thanks to you, i’m learning more and more about computers! i quite like this new comments thing, coz at least it means that we get to see that cute picture of you with blue hair more often!!!
hope all is well wil,
“Long days and pleasant nights”.
love
rach
Suddenly I feel like I’m the only person who’s managed to upgrade to MT 3.14 without breaking anything.
Obligatory fan-girl moment: I’m a long time reader of your blog, but have never posted before. Reading you always makes me smile, though.
Yes, I too am learning new things! Computers are very new to me. I only started last July and now I have two Blogs, and one is even with Metblogs SF! We love you Wil, and I am happy you take so much time with us. Now I have Type Key.
Good call on the type key thing. If I ever have the $$$ I’ll upgrade my old MT blog and use that too. The comment spam was getting far out of hand. So bad my web host shut down my account until I disabled comments (luckily that was after i’d already retired my blog)
Hope that audition went well. looking forward to hearing how it went.
typekey seems cool, I personally approve.
Trying this again
Wil,
I’ve been reading your blog for close to a year now and though I’ve never followed through on the temptation to comment, my curiousity about the TypeKey thing got the best of me. And after registering, how pointless would it be to NOT comment?
So then the dilemma ensues…what’s a worthwhile comment? Well that led to almost wearing out the backspace key. How does one write to writer? My conclusion – keep it simple and sincere.
So thanks. For all you’ve shared with me and with all your readers here, dedicated and casual alike. From heartwarming family moments, to poker epics, to personal performance angst, to silly childhood memories, you’ve made all our lives a little bit richer by sharing some of yours.
No big deal with TypeKey. I’ve already got to use it for a few other blogs where I comment periodically.
Damn spammers. I’m not an IT guy, but I play one for my company on occasion. I’ve wasted at least 20 hours over the past month dealing with reverse NDR attacks on our Exchange 5.5 server and trying to remove (in vain) a particularly tenacious bit of spyware from a salesdude’s computer.
With an environment like this, Steve Jobs and his iPod – Mac Mini combo are going to start taking back some market share. (At which point, people will probably start targeting Firefox and Apple and we’ll start seeing the same problems. Optimistic, aren’t I?)
I like TypeKey. I hope it picks up in a lot of other places.
TypeKey rocks! Just hope my hostess updates my MT soon so that I can start using it on my site.
If there’s a patch for MT to automatically append ref=”nofollow” to all URLs posted in comments, do it. It will prevent Google from using those links in its page ranking, which *should* reduce the incentive to post spam here. Since your site has so many linking to it, any links here will bring their page rank all the ways up.
I’ve done it on all of my sites, although I haven’t noticed much reduction in spam, especially from China. Maybe once they realize it no longer has any effect they may get tired of spamming.
I’d never heard of TypeKey before, so in a way I’m selfishly glad you’re having troubles. I hope it catches on — the whole reason I put up with hosting my journal on LiveJournal is to get the benefit of unified commenting accounts with my friends. TypeKey might end up making self-hosted journals less of a sacrifice in the future.
I haven’t had any comment spam since requiring TypeKey.
I like TypeKey becuase it makes me sure that I’m the only one speaking for myself. I know you’ve had problems with this before, with people saying dumb things and signing your name. This way I know and everyone else knows that if a comment is made using my TypeKey identity, I was the one who said it and not someone pretending to be me.
Now that you have MT 3 installed, I highly recommend the MT-Notified plug-in. It lets people who comment on a post get emails when other comments are left, so they don’t have to keep checking back at your site to see if new comments are posted. It really helps keep conversations going, because people don’t forget to check back on old threads.
Hmm, I didn’t have a TypeKey account before, but I do now. Interesting idea. =)
Okay, now I am registered. However, I have a question as what will get censored and not. For instance, I read WWDN every day, but that does not mean that I necessarily agree with every political post (that does not mean that I voted for Bush either). In addition, I’ve been known to voice my opinion in the comments section, even though it may differ from that vast majority of posters. Does this mean I will be “held accountable” and banned? I am never impolite; I just offer a counter-opinion once and a while.
Ya pretty cool idea, you should leave it on, itll stop a lot of spam comments etc. I dont think taking the time out to register is too much to ask from all your readers seeing as you put in so much time and effort in setting site up. Thats my lecture for today!!
Do you think you got the part in the audition by the way? (was it a play or a film that u were going for?)
Added some new ireland pics on buzznet too by the way.
http://noelburke.buzznet.com
Laterz
Noel
Good idea. I’ve grappled with the concept of comment spam myself on several sites I run for awhile now. I’ve contemplated taking this route, but it’s not to the totally ridiculous point yet where I need to. But I can full well understand where you’re coming from.
One of my sites (black-sabbath.com) I don’t even offer commenting – the abuse potential there is massive.
Haven’t realized MT is evil yet? Ah well.. this TypeKey thing is interesting. My website is generally only visited by friends and family, but I need to investigate implementing TypeKey. Seems like a good solution.
Wait a minute… you can reconfigure and reprogram an entire system on a starship but you can’t get a simple web database working?
(Sorry, I had to say it. It’s my first post, so I can get away with that, right?)
Pax,
Matthew
Well, this is different. Oh well, as long as it works, right? Right.
Bet TypeKey is rather happy, seeing as how quite a few WWdN folk have signed up.
So, Wil. The Iraq “election” is coming up. Interested in hearing what you have to say. Any comments? I, for one, think it’s all BS, and will cause more harm than good for the people of Iraq (sadly), as well as for the Bush Administration (good thing, they deserve the crap they bring on themselves)…
I’ve never heard something about TypeKey before, but after I read something about it now I think it is a good thing to use it for your blog.
Typekey is fine . . . and anything that stops spammers is fabulous in my world . . . I jusst love your site . . and I’m glad to be able to see other commenter’s sites so that I can surf around . . . you have such a good hearted blog and your commenters usually are too . . . so it’s all good 🙂 ps – I loved your last post on being in love/acting as if it doesn’t matter . . . the cynical may rule a great deal of the world but the unabashedly open-hearted get . . . to be more open-hearted 🙂 May your mad passionate love always find a home to be in projects that will respect and honor who you are . . . 🙂 Katherine
Interesting. It’s like a single sign on. I wonder if LJ will integrate it now that six apart has bought them…
Enough of this!!!!
Call somebody and get info on your reading!
The suspense is killing me so you must be going nuts!
Since I am an occasional troller, thought I’d go ahead and sign up for your security do-hickey-thing. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to raz you every now and again. (haha)
Yay, I now finally have something to use my TypeKey account for.
MacKenzie, the one who knows you have pictures of us throwing the goat in tandem from ComicCon 2003 that you still haven’t sent me
Spam, the bane of my Internet existance. It’s definitely the definition of the few ruining it for the many. I don’t think anyone will really mind having to register a TypeKey account, though just to comment – it’s pretty painless and they don’t really ask for much more than your email. (I’ll just have to remember to log in from now on! I always forget that step.)
I, for one, welcome our new TypeKey overlords.
Hey Wil … I’m thinking TypeKey loves you right now. I’m just testing out my new account.
Hope you were a hit at the audition.
I guess it’s a good thing I still remember my typekey password. Or rather, that FireFox remembers it. heh.
Wish I could help out with the M.T., but while I grok mysql, php, (/me phpMySqlAdmin) and perl, I’ve never used M.T. Now geeklog and i are pretty good friends…
Okay then, so we’ve got this TypeKey thing, so yeah, might as well post a comment! 🙂 WOO!
Sorry to hear about spammers on your site. I get them on occassion too…very irritating. Hey, I’m moving to Pasadena now! The commute to Alta Loma was just too much for me. My partner and I have looked at a number of cute homes in the area, so we’ll see what happens. Bye for now.
I think I would like this better – gives others a little insight on who all these names are (well if they fill out profiles anyways)
I hope you get that call soon – I keep checking in hoping to see something about that
Hey!
Long time reader/lurker/observer, first time poster.
I just wanted to say that typekey is awesome, but not as awesome as you.
I wrote to our library enough that we have a few copies of Dancing Barefoot, and we are getting Just a Geek in a few days.
Anyways, rock on.
This gives me a good reason to finally register with TypeKey.
Wow! I can’t believe so many people signed up! That’s cool.
I realized a huge benefit to using TypeKey: I don’t have to worry about some dipshit posting comments with my name anymore.
I’ve made several calls to my manager about the two auditions (last Friday’s for the feature, and Monday’s for the best pilot ever) and I haven’t heard anything. Usually, this means that they’re not interested. I’m hoping that it means a decision hasn’t been made one way or the other.
Also, regarding “censoring” of comments: I’ve never deleted comments simply because someone expresses a contrary opinion. Comments have been deleted and a few people have been banned because they’ve been abusive. Good people can disagree about all sorts of things without being jerks.
Being a fellow MT user(although not with any kind of readership at my current site), I have to say that TypeKey is way cool. Keep up the awesome blog dude, you’re my cyber-hero ^_^
Not that I in any way intend to speak for Wil or the other monkeys… but, hunahpu, you should feel comfortable expressing your point of view as long as it is respectful. I would hate for you to feel like you have to agree with *everything* anybody says… One of the things Americans value most is the right to tell anyone they are full of crap. (of course, we don’t seem to truly relish it like the Germans. If there was a national hobby, I tell ya, behind drinking and driving crazy-alerting someone of their errors would *the* most favorite German activity…believe me, I know.) See, statements like that (narrowminded) are what makes the blog world so much fun to visit!
… right?
oi. nav-commenters.gif not found?
I’m already registered with Typekey for another blog that I read (sorry, Wil, but you’re not the only one) and I don’t really comment here that often, so it’s not really a big deal for me. My only thing is that sometimes Typekey doesn’t recgonize that I’ve signed in. That’s a bit annoying. Otherwise it’s all good
Hey, this is even easier than the old method of commenting!
I think this should stay. Especially if it helps keep the evil spam people away.
Okay, spoke too soon. It won’t let me preview. It says “Build error in template ‘Comment Preview Template’: Error in tag: Can’t find included template module ‘Remember Me'”
Have I done something wrong?
Hey Wil, that pilot you went up for wasn’t “My name is Earl” was it? because that is the best damn pilot I’ve read in a long time. If it wasn’t, is there something else out there that I should be going up for as well? (Nothing wrong with a little competition, eh?) By the way, best of luck, break a leg, and bag the buffalo on everything that comes up this season. There’s nothing that would make me happier than to see you do another series. (something that pays you gobs of dough, but gives you enough time to have a life, like a shitcom!) Or some bitchin indie film that blows up, like “Sideways”. Anyway, all the best, brother.
Just to add to the censorship thing…
While you may disagree strongly with Wil’s views, the best way to combat them is through constructive and mature debate not by acting like a jerk.
sigh…if only bush had the same attitude… (see that was constructive wasnt it? HA!)
Thanks for the update on the auditions by the way. Hope ya get it buddy.
Booking tickets tomorrow for U2 in Dublin this summer. Cant wait!
Laterz
Noel
[Formerly Christy] Okies, got a TypeKey account… Joy, more passwords to remember… Well, It’s worth it. Yay! I can respond!
I made a Typekey account just for you.
Don’t worry about it too much; hopefully this’ll reduce the amount of spam you get.