Comment Problems

Yesterday, a couple of readers emailed me that they were unable to post comments. When I tried to comment as someone other than me I had the same problem. After a little investigation I discovered that the problem involved the NuCaptcha plugin. I disabled NuCaptcha and everything started working again. The NuCaptcha plugin provides the Captcha challenge that tries to distinguish people from bots. It doesn’t always work but it’s pretty good at keeping spam off the site.

When I turned off NuCaptcha, I was astounded at how soon the scum spammers struck. In less than a minute after disabling NuCaptcha I had my first spam comment. From about 2:30 until I turned off comments at around 7:30 I had 25–50 spam comments¹. As I say, astounding. Irreal is, after all, a small site catering to a small (but select) audience. Nonetheless, immediately after dropping our shields we were under sustained attacked by modern day Romulans.

I think the problem is that I haven’t been updating the Twenty Ten theme. That’s because I have some custom CSS markup in it and I didn’t see any reason to update and migrate my additions. Shows what I know. Later today I will create a child theme with my custom CSS and update the theme. If that doesn’t resolve the problem, I may have to change themes. In any event, please be patient while I resolve this problem. As soon as I have things working again, I’ll turn comments back on.

Also, since I turned off NuCaptcha I’ve almost doubled the number of user registrations on the site. Those registrations are almost surely phony and I’ll be deleting them tomorrow. If you registered in the last couple of days, you have my apologies; please register again after I give you the all clear. None of this would be necessary if it weren’t for the scum spammers and the low lives who employ them.