How to get rid of your CAPTCHA and still avoid spam
CAPTCHAs. You hate them, I hate them. Everyone's seen them and everyone will tell you they're annoying.
I'll admit, I used to use a Maths CAPTCHA, cause I thought it'd be easier for someone to add 5 + 6 than to read some scew text-characters. Apparently this only annoyed people more though (there is an amazing aversion to Mathematics out there). I can't blame you, it really is annoying.
And this one is very popular. Which apparently uses CAPTCHAs to help digitize books. That's great, but I don't feel like helping.
Which all brings me to something I'd encourage more people to use.
Spambots fill up fields in a form and submit. If there's a CAPTCHA, advanced spambots actually solve it and enter a value. Which leads to more advanced (nastier-looking) CAPTCHAs.
Invisible Defender is an example of spam-protection that does things a little differently. Instead of displaying a CAPTCHA, it adds a bunch of generic fields to the form. These fields remain invisible/hidden from the typical user:
(Most) Spambots don't realise this and fill up those fields too. The script detects if the fields were filled in and if they are, it shows an 403 error-page to the bots. I heard of this simple-concept about a year ago and thought it was such an eloquent solution. It almost seemed too simple to work.
Mind you, spambots are getting smarter, so some get past this too. But so far it's worked pretty well for me. I'm curious to know about your experiences too!
Highlight comments by Blog-author (Wordpress)
If you'd like to distinguish your own comments from the comments of your visitors, here's how to highlight your comments with just a line of CSS - no extra plugins or unnecessary code.
1 2 3 | .bypostauthor { background-color:#PLACE_YOUR_COLOUR_HERE !important; } |
This works for Wordpress versions 2.7+
Facebook lacks a simple feature
How do you search for all of your friends that are from or in a specific location (e.g. all my friends in Namibia right now)?
Sounds like a simple enough search.
Or is this feature already implemented?
Update:
It's not linked to from the front-page - only when you do a search: http://www.facebook.com/advanced.php
Update:
And as a commenter pointed out, http://www.facebook.com/advanced.php doesn't exist anymore!
Flickr comment generator
For anyone that's tired of coming up with comments, let the generator do the work for you:
If you would like me to add more comments to the database, comment here or contact me.
Full-res texture (Creative-commons)
Free texture for commerical/non-commercial work (creative-commons license):
If you do use it, I'd love to see what you come up with!
Automatically insert rubbish Flickr-comments with Flickr-comment-generator
I created an AJAX application that generates somewhat generic comments for Flickr. But I soon realised that people would not use it unless it was completely simple and automated.
That's where GreaseMonkey comes into action. I've created a GreaseMonkey script that automatically retrieves a random flickr-comment and places it into the comment text-field of a picture. You get to choose whether you would like to publish the comment or not.
If you notice any bugs in the script, or any improvements I can make to the script - please let know.
Go to Flickr-Comment generator
Or download the script directly