Free Software Linux

If you’ve tried to leave comments here recently, bless you, and I’m sorry. First, the WP-OpenID plugin for one specific version (2.2.0) had a bug which ate comments containing double quotes, which means all comments with links in them. 2.2.1 fixes the problem. Then, Luis Villa told me in email that the Captcha on my site was unusable. So I tried it, and he’s right. A while back I installed a plugin for Mollom, which catches comments which are thought to be suspicious in one way or another, and then asks users to solve a captcha. Problem is that they were all unsolvable.

User comments seem to be a hot topic as of late. Much of it related to why newspapers should either eliminate or enhance them. In a recent article on Gawker.com, it was strongly suggested that comments should be rid of altogether, citing that "newspapers have more important things to do than worry about comments" and that blogs are "not equipped to regularly break the news." They don't think that the comments a published story garners adds anything to the content, nor do they help to engage a discussion among readers. Though they do find value in the blogs hosted by reporters, they argue that the comments posted by users do nothing more than expose the ignorance of readers and had they been submitted as letters to the editor, they would never been published in the first place.

(Update, 2pm ET: Scott Hintz from TripIt replied in the comments on the original post apologizing for the employee’s behavior - thanks Scott.) One of the famous cartoons of the first internet craze was this one from the New Yorker: On the Internet Nobody Knows You're a Dog

I’ve enabled Mollom-based anti-spam to this blog - please let me know if this causes any unexpected difficulty or errors. Mollom will ask “suspicious” commenters to solve a CAPTCHA before allowing their comments to post. If this proves too onerous I will go back to just using Askimet but I wanted to try it out.

I have no idea whether this is satire, but there seems to be an influx of dumb posts about Ubuntu lately. This seems to take the cake.

Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Firefox extension YouTube Comment Snob filters comments on YouTube videos that don't meet your snobbish standards. It does so using a combination of criteria, like a...

Firefox with Greasemonkey only: Two of the Lifehacker editors may reside on the West coast, but our site stats tell us that most of you are on Eastern time, and that means you'd probably like to see...

As several dozen of you will have noticed, I haven't been posting comments to some stories. The reason is simple: I never saw them. Gmail's spam filter decided that most of the comments sent to me for moderation should be summarily eaten. It is only now, having gone through a few thousands spam messages, that I've found most of them (I hope) and posted them. Apologies for the delay. If I've missed any, please feel free to send them through again, and I'll try to save them from Gmail's anti-spam maw. What's particularly worrying is that Google is rejecting messages from blogspot.com - it's own domain. Worse, I've found many Google alerts, from the google.com domain, also classed as spam. If Gmail can't even tell whether messages from Google are not spam, there's clearly something seriously wrong with Google's filters. Anyone else having the same problems?