I haven’t posted since waaaaay back in October, before I went to Istanbul to visit Ahu’s side of the family. The reason is that this website has been attacked every single day by a new breed of “spam” - the comment advertisement. About 150 or so comments have been added to various articles on this website advertising everything from online casinos to phentermine. I can’t tell if it is being done by a person or by a new spambot but its been a bit annoying.
The way content management works on ForkBender.com is that I go into the Narrative CMS and enter content. I set the status of that content to “Live” when I am ready for it to go to the website. However, it does not go to the site just yet. It used to be that way but I decided I wanted more control over the timing of publication so I added a feature which allows me to click a button and do a site “refresh”. Only after I hit this button does all the new content show up.
The problem is that I didn’t want to refresh the website and have all those useless comments show up. I also didn’t want to go in and manually delete 150 comments. So I’ve been working on a utility for myself which allows me to rapidly delete comments I think are inappropriate as well as a new feature for the comment editing form which ensures that the entity entering content is a live human. The utility is now done and I deleted all the offending comments. The “live human” feature is coming shortly. Until then, I am monitoring the website for new offending comments and will delete them as they come in. So…back to posting content!