I've re-enabled open commenting on Nuketown (meaning posts will be posted without being pre-screened). The Mollom module for Drupal has been doing an admirable job catching spam and I think it's up to the task.
We'll see what actually happens; if we get a major spam attack that Mollom can't handle, I'll have to fall back to the "must authenticate to post without approval" stance I've had since June.
Nuketown's been upgraded to Drupal 6, which is the latest stable version of the open source content management system. So far, things seem to have made it through the upgrade intact, though I discovered that the Image Assist module now only wants to display images that have been "published".
I think that my test instance (aka The Testing Range) may also have accidentally spammed those with user accounts by sending them an email with links to a bunch of published comments. If so, I apologizes for that -- I'm not exactly sure what why those messages had queued up.
It's possible that there's still some stuff that needs to be cleaned-up post-upgrade, so if you see anything that looks weird (or is outright broken) please post a comment to this thread or email me at nuketown@gmail.com.
Long-time visitors to the site may be wondering what's going on with comments at Nuketown; for the last year or so, anyone could post without having to log in or have their posts moderated. That's no longer the case.
The problem is spam; the site has been inundated with a particularly annoying variety of comment spam that uses random snippets of legitimate text taken from other web sites, news stories, etc. and a smattering of legitimate hyperlinks to provide cover for hardcore porn comments linking to sites that are anything but legitimate.
Akismet, my anti-spam tool, has had a hard time keeping up with this assault. Rather than have these comments make it to the web site, I've decided to change the way comments are handled at Nuketown.
For the foreseeable future, all comments from unauthenticated visitors will go into a moderation queue. I'll then approve or deny the comments based on their spamminess. Those with accounts on Nuketown can login and post comments without moderation.
It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than closing off comments to anonymous visitors entirely. I'm hoping I can switch back to unmoderated comments once Akismet figures out how to deal with these spam swarms.
It's been awfully quiet around here the last week or so, and I thought I'd post a note before folks wonder if I'd crawled off to a cave for information detox.
If only.
I work at a college as a web applications developer. And the thing about working in higher education (or hell, any form of education) is you tend to move through life somewhat perpendicular to the real world. My year starts in July, and ends in June, because that's how our academic calendar rolls. My life gets crazy in late August and late January, because that's when the Fall and Spring semesters begin.
The pace hits an even more frantic note in January and July/August because that's when the faculty and students aren't on campus (or most of them aren't at least) so we conduct this biannual mad dash to get all of our critical upgrades and new programs in place so things will be nice and shiny when everyone hits campus.
The lulls (and yes, there are lulls) come about two weeks into the semester and last until about two weeks after it ends. Which isn't to say we're sitting around playing cards all day, but it is a more relaxed, less frantic state of being.
But now is not that time. Now is the crazy time, and thus, the profound lack of posts around here.
I've been experimenting with analytics on Nuketown for the last few months, setting Google Analytics to watch the site's web traffic and Feedburner to keep an eye on the RSS feeds.
Over all, things are going about as well as they usually do, with no huge spikes up or down. The top referrers -- the sites that send me traffic -- continue to be gamingreport.com and rpgbloggers.com, in that order, which just goes to show I should have been posting news items about my Nuketown game reviews to gamingreport years ago.
What I find most interesting about these two analytics tools though, are the most popular pages they report. These were the most popular pages for October 2008 according to Google:
Given the dearth of posts around Nuketown last week, I thought I'd borrow a page from Uncle Bear's Sunday Brunch and give an update on the ol'thermonuclear burg. The day job has settled back down to its normal routine, but as Doc Brown once said "It's your kids ... something has got to be done about your kids!"
The few weeks in late September/early October where everyone was sick have given rise to some serious sleep problems around our house. The kids are sleeping through the night about two nights out of every seven ... if we're lucky.
And we're not very lucky.
Bad dreams, hacking coughs, wet diapers -- every night there's some new wrinkle that has one or both kids up, crying and wanting us. We've been battling back, trying to get them to sleep in their own beds, taking steps (like giving them less to drink before bed time) to cut down on bathroom trips and wet diapers, doing our best to rock them back to sleep, but sometimes you just have to give up and bring them to bed.
Coupled with a bumper crop of freelance game reviews to do, and my wife's month-long run up to a holiday craft show in November, and an Xbox 360 that decided to up and die in the middle of it all, well I've just been too tired to think.
Thus, no blogging.
In case you missed it, I'm running a poll asking whether or not I should bring back the RADIATIONS email newsletter. RADIATIONS ran for a good number of years, but I gave it up when I moved to Drupal and had an easy way of producing an RSS feed for the site. I'm considering it bringing it back because personally, I find newsletters to be a handy way of remembering to visit the sites I enjoy. And if I like it, well, I figure others will as well.
The RPG Bloggers Network has been a tremendous success, sparking plenty of cross-blog traffic and comments. I’ve read lots of great articles and discovered a bunch of new sites, but I think there’s one area where the community can improve: game reviews.
Simply put, there aren’t enough of them. There’s plenty of speculation, analysis and debate but there aren’t nearly enough reviews (or, if they are there, they are quickly lost among the flurry of other posts). The RPG Bloggers guys are working on improvements to bring order to the chaos by adding new categories, but even then I think there will be a need for bloggers to knuckle down and review games.
I have as much work to do as anyone else. It shocked me earlier this week when I looked at my own RPG reviews category and discovered that five months had passed between my Battlestar Galactica RPG review and my new one for Star Wars: Threats of the Galaxy. Now granted, my sense of what I’ve written is distorted by all the writing I do for SCIFI, and I’ve certainly posted a bunch of quasi-reviews in the form of playtest reports, but still … there need to be more.
Nuketown's passed 500 comments. At least a hundred of those came from this spring alone, which goes to show just how much better my new "open" approach to commenting is (in which anyone can comment without an account, but messages are screened by the Askimet anti-spam software before being posted).
The community's coming together nicely, and I have no doubt that the count would be even higher if I, ahem, got Radio Active out on the consistent, weekly schedule I always hope for.
It's an excellent milestone, and I'm hoping we'll reach the next one -- 750 comments -- by the end of the summer. Which means I better stop patting myself on the back, and start writing more blog posts...