So, ever since I’ve put this up in this format, I’ve been trying to control the comment SPAM that seems to plague blogs on a periodic basis. If you’re not familiar with this concept, count yourself among the fortunate. My first effort was simply to force that all comments would require moderation. This was good, and it did help, but it ultimately doesn’t solve the problem. It just means I have to go in and ‘clean up’ the comment moderation queue every once in awhile of all the crap in there.

With the upgrade to 1.5, I once again checked out all the plugins that are related to controlling comment spam, and decided to try this one, called AuthImage. At first, I was a bit tweaked. It meant having to go back to the webserver installation itself, and get the GD support in PHP working. Crapola. I remembered getting frustrated by that the first time around.

I went back, got all the latest copies of the libs, and with the exception of one hitch involving the freetype2 libraries, it compiled fine. Ok, so then I went back to the AuthImage stuff, and followed the instructions there. If you read this, Gudlyf, please please break out the <1.5 and 1.5 instructions into two separate sections. I think I eventually went through the intructions like 4 times before I got it right. Having those separated would have eased the process tremendously. Or … don’t. It could be that I just don’t read well. Whatever.

In any case, the code is now working. If you want to submit a comment to any post, it REQUIRES that you enter an authorization code from a randomly generated image, more commonly called a captcha. Geeks are so very very clever. I’ll let you know how it goes in a couple weeks. There are, of course, ways to get around just about anything programmatically, but at some point, the effort is outweighed by the cost. We’ll see….

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