Waffle

If I had a linklog (which I will, soon), I'd simply put this in there, but until then, I'll have to comment a little bit. Teresa Nielsen Hayden discusses how online communities deal with spam, trolls and stalkers.

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Sigh... I got out of bed this morning, checked the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan front page and found the comic's image file missing. I have no idea what went wrong this time, and I'm getting a bit worn down by having to solve a critical problem to one of my web sites each morning before breakfast. The comic's back in the update queue, and will hopefully look normal in 15 minutes or so.

It's taken me a lot of aggravation, but the Gallery works again! Next step: Make it work with Movable Type! Muahaha!

I dimly recall mentioning on the blog that instead of having comments enabled, I was going to refer people to the Reinder Dijkhuis forum if they wanted to discuss posts here. I was hoping at the time that I would find a way to automate this so that Timm or Adam could point people to the <a href="http://talkaboutcomics.com/viewforum.php?f=264>Dangerous and Fluffy forum, and Jeroen to the Capn forum. Geir would not have a forum of his own to link to, but since he rarely posts it would be easy to accommodate discussion on any of the above anyway. He could room with me. It'll have to wait, though, because Talkaboutcomics.com, which hosts my forum and the D&F one, is also straining under the load put on it, and is going down for more emergency maintenance in the next few hours. Could be down for one or two days as well. This could be a sign from above that God wants less talk from all of us.

Cartoonist Dirk-Arend has put together a tribute to Fred Julsing on his blog. It's in Dutch, but definitely worth a look, because it has many illustrations, including some of the dailies he penciled for Toonder studios. And (Squeeeee!) it has some old Jippo covers by Julsing. I have these magazines lying around somewhere, still.... Many images can be enlarged. The article also links to some very nicely done Flash presentations at the semi-official Julsing Fansite.

I'm not sure if this is part of the fallout from my attempts to get Movable Type upgraded, but the Reinder Dijkhuis gallery is down right now. It returns this error: "Fatal error: Cannot re-assign $this in /home/rocr/public_html/gallery/classes/Album.php on line 412". This is a bit of a problem. I haven't upgraded either the software or the content in a long time, and it does have comment functionality. In other words, it may be as vulnerable as Movable Type (with comments enabled) is. I've contacted the hosting site administrator and will decide what to do with the gallery in a few days. Thanks to reader starrclaw for alerting me to this. Update: Upgrading gallery is as fraught with problems as upgrading Movable Type. The pattern is that upgrading a program of this complexity either goes smoothly the first time, or will keep you tearing your hair out endlessly. Because the config script exited with an error the first time I ran it, I can now expect to lose more of my already quite sparse hair. And for a while there, the cascade of computer errors and human errors affected the blog as well. Long story. Probly won't bother to tell it. Update: Okay, I'll tell a little bit. I've been futzing with file permissions to resolve the problem of why a file that was in the Gallery directory couldn't be read. This was dangerous stuff, and resulted in *everything* being set to 700, ie. owner can do everything, the rest of the world can do nothing, for a while. In the process of repairing the file permissions, I have "fixed" the final errors that showed up in relation to the blog. I'm somewhat concerned that bits are less secure than they should be, and will inform Xepher of this concern later, but at least I got a smoothly-functioning Movable Type install out of it.

During the blog's outage, I continued to follow the debate on whether "nofollow" was useful, harmful, neither or both. Right now, I don't feel like catching up with that. I'm sure anyone who's interested in fighting comment spam has seen most of the arguments. Except this one:

I noticed several hours ago that for some reason the trackback section of my index page was no longer marked up properly. ... The discovery was followed by a series of progressively more outlandish attempts to coax recalcitrant code into revealing itself, without success. What really hurt was how the comments, which were encased in the exact same html code structure, performed flawlessly. Then I remembered I had installed the new "nofollow" Movable Type plugin earlier in the day. I removed it, and my problems were gone More about "nofollow" here. . I briefly considered being a hero and repairing the plugin, but then I saw the grep pattern that adds the "nofollow" rel attributes to comment and trackback links, and it is a monster, so I'll settle for flagging this bug. ...

One or two people in that harmful/useful debate have expressed amazement over the speed at which the concept was rushed into becoming a de facto standard by Google, Yahoo, MSN and major blog software developers. If the implementation was equally rushed, it's no surprise that the plugin is buggy.

This untitled comic by Snape-obsessed artist Gmonkey got a "Bwa ha ha" out of Einar and a delighted "Squee!" out of Timm. It made me laugh as well when I found it in the comments to a limyaael Livejournal rant. Gmonkey is no Michaelangelo, but her interpretations of the Harry Potter characters work, and her story is funny as hell. And she knows her Mary Sues:

"Sadly, I am the last of my kind." "How sad! It must be hard for you, with all the prejudice against Catpeople, despite the fact that they have really powerful magic and stuff."

Read it. It's short and sweet. Her other Snape comics are worth reading as well.

Okay! Now the blog is finally back. I still need to improve the entry screens (after the events of the past couple of days, something has been chmodded so that I can't see images and logos inside the entry panels, and that annoys me a little bit), but the core functionality seems to be working. The bad news is that there will be no comments in the near future. The one thing I didn't get to function was MT-Blacklist, and that's bad enough, but even if it did work, I'd be reluctant to switch comments back on. Just minutes after the last time I got the blog working, my Movable Type directory got flooded with comment spams, taking down not just the blog but the entire xepher.net host. Xepher responded by shutting down all MT intallations across the network. He has now kindly allowed me to switch everything on, except the comments, and I'm not going to press the issue right now because even if I get MT-blacklist working again, the load caused by the failed attempts at posting comment spams is enough to hose Xepher.net again.

In preparation for a day when I will want to try and switch comments on again, I have uploaded and installed MT-DBSL and Real Comment Throttle, as well as alerting Xepher to possible apache-side solutions and making a mental note of this Movable Type hack that automagically adds IP addresses to the IP ban list if they post crap that matches the blacklist — it may not be useful to me while the blacklist is kaput, but it will be useful some time.

I recommend that everyone with a Movable Type blog reads A Six Apart Guide to Fighting Comment Spam, Killing Comment Spam the Pete Way and Concerning Spam. But for now, no comments until we are sure we can deal with the consequences of crapfloods for the server. I will look at alternative community-building solutions. And tart the blog up with avatars so it's easier to see who's posting.

Okay, the upgrade seems to be working. I hate the new look with (in Opera) impossibly narrow entry fields and no columns or buttons, but I expect that fixing the style sheet will not be too difficult. Comments will remain switched off until I manage to import a master MT-Blacklist, which the system won't let me do for some reason. I expect that that will be difficult. If you have a tip or otherwise want to comment, send it to reinder@despammed.com.

Update: the entry page style sheet has been fixed, making that part of the site usable. Also, I'm trying to get the RandomLine plugin to work again, so that quotes appear on top of the main index again.