Drupal

Even though spam.module was tagged as available for Drupal 5.0, it turned out it was not functional at all for the new release. I discovered this only after upgrading all of my Drupal sites.

With the spam and captcha modules both unavailable for 5.0, comments would have been wide-open to spammers, so I’ve reverted to requiring user accounts to post comments both here and on Uncabled. You can register for an account or, like with most Drupal sites, you can use your login and password info from another Drupal site — simply change the format of your username to other_username@other_website.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but really, it’s the spammers’ fault.

Spam just makes my blood boil. I’d mentioned this on the OPML blog, but I’ve started to get spam on Uncabled, even though I’ve enabled CAPTCHAs!

It’s incredible the amount of effort spammers go through to get their crap on other people’s sites, but the economy of it makes it worth it. It must be so mind-bloggingly cheap to produce spam that the few moments when this kind of research needs to be paid for they are perfectly willing to do so.

Needless to say, after this weekend of configuring all my Drupal sites to run from a shared installation — making the process of keeping the sites up to date on patches and what-not a whole lot easier — I reinstalled the spam.module. This module is a godsend, and so good that I decided to reinstall the trackback.module now that it hooks into the spam detection. Immediately upon reinstalling it on teradome.com, the filter caught roughly a dozen trackback spams. Good god. I remember reading something that said a machine running Windows 95 will have a security-breach attempt run on it within 5 minutes of connecting it to the internet. Now I believe it.

So now I’m running spam filters and CAPTCHAs? Sadly, yes. You know, if Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) wants to blame the slowness of the internet on anything, maybe he should start with the spammers.

Don’t ask me why, but I went and updated Teradome’s Drupal installation to 4.7 RC 1.* I suppose since I got so crazy sick, I might as well be a little productive while I’m sitting on my butt with my MacBook Pro that can’t remote into my office’s ultra-paranoid security system.

For those who follow my Drupal side, that means that I’ve also gone and committed the necessary patch (thx leafish_paul!) to marksmarty.module that needed to go in for 4.7. It should show up on the Modules page fairly soon (it’s not immediate after a CVS commit).

* The only downsides to the upgrade was the lack of spam.module (replaced with a captcha for now) and quotes.module for 4.7. Hopefully those two will be ported soon!

[Edited 2006-04-05] For the time being, you’ll need to go to the modules page and select “4.7.x” on the page filter to see the updated release, as the “latest release” option on the project page won’t reflect anything Drupal-4.7 until it is officially launched. Sorry!

Happy new year, everyone!

Well, it’s been a blast at the top, so to speak, but with the release of Drupal 4.6 I’ve decided to bring teradome.com off of CVS HEAD and bring it back to the world of the Daily. It was a great place to be, getting to use all the advancements as they come—the problem, however, is when your modules must work together, and the advancements don’t come at the same time. That is, when you get conflicts galore. Since I don’t have the time to deal with those kinds of issues immediately, I wanted to get back to having my homepage being built on a solid reference, where all things 4.6 must work with other things 4.6.

In a way, CVS is a frontier-town where anything can happen, and does, and conflicts arise and resolve within the same day. Releases are Capitol Hill—long deliberations, where agreements come before any action is taken, and the status-quo is enforced. Sure, I’ll still be installing a workspace somewhere with CVS HEAD to experiment with, but I won’t be publishing it to the world anymore. And I’ll get more free time on the weekends to boot.

We just might be drowning in tags. I know I am.

By the way, I’ve had to patch Drupal rather heavily to support categories in the RSS feed. I haven’t yet seen my post/subjects show up under Technorati tags yet, but I’m keeping my eyes open. A huge flaw with Technorati is that you can never see your site as it sees it, so you can never tell if it’s getting pings properly or indexing posts properly.