Double Journey

Seems like adding reCaptcha didn’t really do much for me in regards to fighting comment spam.  Seems that most of the comment spam I get comes in the form of Trackbacks which reCaptcha can do nothing about.  Even after I put up reCaptcha I was still averaging over 100 spam comments a day.  Couple that with the fact that kirah complained that her comment got eaten and she didn’t even notice it, and my original fear proved correct.  I burdened my legitimate users without adding any real protection.

I will have to go another way to fight the spam.  I suppose I can just let Askimet do its job.  It catches most if not all of the trackback spam.  Just annoying that I have to sometimes sit through it and look to see if any legitimate comments got through.

In my last post, I openly wondered why I get so much comment spam.  It was amazing to me that a small site like mine could be the target of so much spam.  Thankfully, pyrochild left a comment and directed me to a wordpress plugin called reCaptcha.  I’m going to test drive it out for a few days and see how it is.  Hopefully my spam will go way down without annoying anyone who wants to leave a comment.  So please, by all means, tell me what you think.  If you have any issues with it, leave a comment.  Well, hopefully it doesn’t block you from leaving a comment

At first I was a little annoyed that the program ask you to solve two different words.  But then, after reading the site, I discover that one word is known, and is used to verify that you are indeed human.  The other one is used to help with digitizing old books.  So not only are you leaving a comment on my blog, but you are helping the world become more literate.  All the more reason to leave lots of comments.

I’ve had this website up for a few months now, and I’ve gotten over 6,000 instances of comment spam.  Not sure why I’m getting so much.  My site isn’t all that popular, at least not traffic wise, yet my askimet spam filter gets pummeled with several hundred spam comments a day.  If my poor little site gets this much, I really wonder what some big websites get.  Now, I could do more to try and combat the spam.  I could certainly make it harder for my readers to post a comment.  But I think that really destroys the purpose of a blog.  I don’t like solutions that make it hard for legitimate users to use a service just to prevent the bastards who try and make the rest of our life hard.  So for now, I’ll just keep watching my askimet spam number go through the roof, and hope that your comments don’t get lost in the crowd.

I was going to respond to the comment that Stephen left in my post about smoking being good for you but decided that a full post would be better served. Full disclosure. I don’t smoke. I hate smoking. I hate being around smokers. I generally won’t go to a place if they allow smoking. That being said, I have no problem buying shares of the largest tobacco producer around.

One of the things you can’t do when you are trying to pick stocks, especially in the short term, is worry too much about the social impact of what you are doing. When people tell me that they have a problem buying a certain stock this is what I tell them. Buy the stock, and when you make a lot of money, support a charity that tries to address the issue. So if you don’t like smoking, fund lung cancer research. If you don’t like alcohol stocks, fund a charity like MADD.  Stocks are just pieces of paper.  Buying the stock doesn’t actually help the issuing company.  A stock trade is between you and some other third party, the original company does not directly benefit from your purchase (they do indirectly but that would be a whole other post)

That being said, there are literally thousands of stocks you can buy. So if you really feel that strongly about it, just try to find a similar stock with a similar thesis. If you don’t want to buy a stock like Altria, look at other consumer staples like Coke or Kellogg (I don’t recommend these like I do Altria by the way).

I added a new plugin to track who was commenting on this blog. I want to thank everyone who has thus far left a comment for me. Only two weeks into this little adventure, I have done better in terms of comments than I would have originally thought. Comments are like crack to bloggers. It makes it worth coming in and spending some time, often a lot of time, to come up with something interesting and worthwhile. I enjoy interacting with other people on this blog, and so I encourage everyone to try and get to the top in terms of “Top Commenters”

So to all those who have commented thus far, thanks. For all those of you who haven’t commented yet, why haven’t you?

I had someone ask me if it was OK to link to my site. The simple answer is Yes!

I could use all the link love I can get right now. It’s hard when you are first starting out a website because you can feel kind of alone out here sometimes. That’s why the comments are always appreciated, and the links back to my site are always welcome. If I really wanted to keep this a secret, I wouldn’t put it out on the web for the world to see. In fact, the very point of me starting up a website and blogging about it is to solicit others feedback, and get ideas on what to do next. The more ideas and comments that come my way the better. So please, publicize my website. Talk and link all you want. And of course, please keep the comments coming

As I wrote this post, I started thinking about how I could encourage people to link to this site and to leave comments behind. One easy way would be to run a contest. I need to think about this a little bit more and fully develop the idea, but you can be sure it will be coming soon. If you want to get a head start though, please link to my site, or leave some comments. I’ll count any link or comment now toward that contest

Anyone else have any bright ideas on how best to increase traffic and participation?