Comments, SezWho, spam, and tips!

I've been tweaking with the comments systems here, and trying to get it as easy as possible, among other things. I hate spam (duh), and have taken steps to eliminate it: Enter Mollom, yet another brainchild from Dries Buytaert, the creator of Drupal.

I've been inundated with a load of spam pretty much since I set up this site. Comment spam is annoying to both me and the reader, and I'd rather not spend my time moderating it. So I signed up with Mollom, installed their Drupal module, and said the magic words, "Alakaspambegone!"

With Mollom turned on, I've enabled approval-less comments, so now even Anonymous commenters will not have to wait for the comment to be approved. Good stuff indeed. So that's fixed, that just leaves the ginormous amount of trackback spam...

Trackback spam. How annoying. I can't find a good utility for defeating the trackback spam, as I get four pages of the shit almost every day, or every two days. It's ridiculous! So, I emailed Mollom support about it and Dries had this to say:

We currently don't support trackback spam. It's one of the many things on our TODO list though -- feel free to help.

Trust me, if I knew the first thing about complex php programming--nevermind the genius work that goes on behind creating decision-making spam algorithms--I'd help. So, if any of you PHP gurus know your shit when it comes to spam filtering, you may want to contact Dries and give it a whack. I'm sure that making a large contribution to the Mollom code and systems would look REALLY good on a resume, as well as get in at pretty much the ground floor of a pretty exciting product.

Speaking of contributing to projects, I've been lending Slap/Pop to Ravi at SezWho as a guinea pig. The SezWho module out of the box didn't work the way it should've, and so we've been playing email tag, and I've been swapping in different php files after he makes some code changes, and so far, I think it's working pretty well. It's still not putting up the SezWho UI in the comments to people who aren't me (it shows up on my comments, but not other people's), but the rating seems to be there, and everything's good at that point. Hopefully within a week we'll have a fully operational battlestation--er, SezWho module. Again, since I can't code too well, I follow directions. That, I can do!

Last, but not least--and I'll mention it in another shorter, more concise post later on--is the fact that I added a "tipjar", basically... That Top Spots thing at the top right of the page... Make a donation, your link goes up there for however long before it gets bumped off by ten other tippers. At the rate that the tips have been flooding in (lol!), it'll probably stay there for a good long time. So if you're feeling generous, please leave me a small tip, your link gets up there, and I'll pimp out the link other ways as well. If you have Entrecard and I can afford it, I'll advertise on your site. If I have an overflow of EC credits, I'll send you some. Something. All I know is, I'm broke, having a VERY hard time finding a job, and the tips would be mucho appreciated-o.

And yes, I'm aware this is long... It's much longer than I originally expected, so if you read the whole thing, thanks! :D