Site news: How I spent my day off
My work schedule doesn’t give me a lot of time to do the citizen journalism thing. So I look forward to me day off to do things like make phone calls, visit people, go through documents.
My days off are currently scheduled for Mondays and Tuesdays. I spent Monday with relatives and helping out Jonathan Ahl with his journalism class. Blogger Bash is later tonight (for which I am missing a a City Council meeting).
What am I doing with the rest of my “weekend?” It’s not doing the citizen journalism thing. It’s being spent downloading and tersting plugins and hacks designed to FIX THE FRIGGIN’ SPAM PROBLEM!
As you all know, I’m now requiring all commenters to be registered with the site. I’m doing that to improve the quality of the commenting, and also to hamper comment spam.
To aid in the fight against spam, I’ve installed three plugins. The first lets users set up a blacklist of email addresses and domains that cannot be used to register. Another creates a catchpa and/or a math question that would be registrants must solve before they can register as members of the site, then requires them to reply to an email before they are approved. The third is supposed to make it harder for spammers to send trackbacks to my site by validating content.
If ANYONE tries to register and never receives their confirmation email just let me know. If anyone is told they can’t register with their chosen email address, try a service like GMail or Yahoo.
 Maybe now I can get back to blogging and stop having to blog about blogging.
In other site news: I’m deactivating the Kubrick style themes and the Theme Switcher. I’ve stopped supporting these themes and have no further use for them.
Billy Dennis is a former reporter and editor at small daily and weekly newspapers in Illinois and Missouri. He comments on media, news and politics. He also owns and operates 
