Free Software Linux

I began running this website on Drupal 6 shortly after the official release.  Before then, I periodically installed development version of Drupal 6 on the production server during the weekends so others could judge the progress that was being made.  During this period, I made the claim that I didn't really need any contributed modules to run my site on Drupal 6.

This Drupal site of mine has taken quite a bit of beating the past couple weeks.  While Mollom has been protecting this site well enough from the comment spammers, it isn't designed to prevent the bots from trying to do their pinging me so much.  It has been an incredible experience to see the bots try to open every possible URL and directory here at CMSReport.com.  But probably the real stress on the site has been my testing of numerous contributed modules that are still under development.  Probably using a production server to test new modules isn't the smartest thing for anyone to do, but it does provide a nice adrenaline rush from time to time.

I really don't like Captchas, the squiggly words that many websites use to protect forms from spam bots. Unfortunately, sometimes they are the only thing that can protect a site from clever spammers. Yesterday I heard a great story about reCaptcha, captchas that are used to crowd-source digitizing of old print books and newspapers on NPR. If you have ever tried to use a scanner with OCR, you know that it can be pretty hit or miss. read more

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.

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.

Acquia presented at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last week, and Jeff Whatcott, who manned the Acquia stand, writes in a blog entry that most of the corporate types swinging past his booth had no idea what Drupal was.

Dries Buytaert does not appear to be a man who likes to sit down and rest. He has just announced his newest startup Mollom -- automated content monitoring -- is available free in public beta.