Xaprb

I’m not using my previous combination of Bad Behaviour + WP-Gatekeeper anymore. I’ve removed them in favor of ordinary reCAPTCHA. Although it lets a lot of spammers through (almost a thousand spam comments in the day I’ve had it enabled) and Bad Behaviour let only 1 or 2 a month through, it became clear that a lot of people were getting blocked wrongly by Bad Behaviour.

This means that I can’t practically moderate the spam queue. If you submit a comment and it doesn’t get published, you either went into the spam queue that I ignore, or I decided to censor you ;-) Feel free to email me if you think anything’s wrong.

Someone’s testing my blog recently, trying by hand to get comments through my spam blockers. They’re trying by hand because automated attempts are blocked and the server simply doesn’t respond. Hand-submitting spam doesn’t scale, so only a few have popped up on my admin screen.

Have fun, I.P. addresses 173.213.212.234 and 219.91.208.244 (remember the Internet isn’t anonymous). If you look around this blog you won’t notice any spam comments. There’s a reason for that — a combination of reasons, actually. You’re unlikely to defeat the measures I’ve put in place, unless you try things that most people would consider hacking. And if you do that, be prepared for the consequences.

Of course, if you’re actually trying to leave a comment, just do it. All appropriate comments are approved, although sometimes it takes me a few hours to moderate them.

I got a really intriguing email today. As you might imagine, I get a lot of email offering to advertise, or trade links, or guest post, etc etc. But this is the most compelling one I’ve ever gotten:

I came across your blog http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2009/03/13/50-things-to-know-before-migrating-oracle-to-mysql/ a few weeks ago as while conducting research for a website that I contribute to. The website aims to look at the progressive areas of early childhood psychology. The idea was originally to create an objective collection of resources for people interested in psychology but it has since grown into something much wider (the resources come together at [redacted]). Today, the project looks at important factors in childhood development that pay dividends in the future.

I think a guest blog post that illuminates the the advancement of our understanding of childhood development would be interesting for your audience. If you’re interested, I would love to write something for you and perhaps start a friendly dialogue. What do you think?

Thanks, and I look forward to hearing from you.

All my best,

Sarah Thompson (sarahjthompson5@gmail.com)

The thing is, I know someone who’s been on the Oprah show and written many, many bestselling books on child psychology, so this perked up my ears right away. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this is an incredible value to my readers. Everyone interested in migrating between database servers ought to know about childhood psychology. I plan to say yes and to start an entire series of blog posts on this and other highly relevant topics, such as the mating behavior of slugs, the history of central Asia, air pressure in a vacuum, and how many disciples Jesus really had. Look forward to the first installment shortly.