The Geekorium

I have a couple of things I want to write about but first on my list is to keep the pledge I made to finish the story I was writing over 10 years ago and finially publish how it ends.

The story is called Space Flight 704. BUT before you click on that you might want to wait!

First, I formatted the posts to do specific text effects in my previous site iteration. I intend to fix them, and would hold off until that’s done, but well that’s how we got here isn’t it? So later chapters will look and behave weirdly, such as this:

So as unhappy as I am that it’s in that state, maybe by posting it you can see I mean to make it good again.

In my defence, I still think a post that switches timelines as you read is fun, but it makes it a mess to read. And seriously everyone, I absolutely adore this story because it’s got time travel, and a thick skulled hero called Rex Havoc, and dumb space weapons, and evil villains with evil lairs, and betrayal, and mayhem!

I wondered about posting the chapters from the start on the fediverse, one day at a time for about 100 days. The posts are ready to go to do so too, but the fediverse software out there makes my head ache when I think about self hosting it and I don’t know which instance will give me scheduled posts and markdown. The recommendations I’ve had are for glitch-soc and misskey forks, but I’ll need to find a healthy and pleasant instance.

That all said, if you’re not put off and you still want to read, the latest chapter is up at Space Flight 704, Chapter 72: For the First Time, and the whole series starts at the beginning at the link above. The formatting goes off the rails at chapter 11.

I hope you can enjoy it like I enjoyed writing it, and like some of my friends at the time 10 years ago seemed to enjoy it.

I’ve re-enabled comments here at The Geekorium, and imported all my old comments, so go nuts!

To import all your old comments, I used a script written by someone else, then parsed them through a dodgy PHP script I made myself to rename everything into the format my site is relying on, so there might be shenanigans with the imported comments. Please let me know if anything seems off.

That leaves me with the next question: how do I ensure I don’t get flooded with spam? I’ve had comments back on for all of 2 days, and I get a steady trickle of Pull Requests from the Staticman bot triggered by spam comments. On the Wordpress site I had Akismet turned on, which all but eliminated bad-faith for me, the way modern email clients almost never let the chaff through.

The simplest answer is the Google reCAPTCHKA¹ - the latest version doesn’t even ask you to tick the “I’m not a robot” box let alone click on thirteen boxes of street crossings. It’s a tempting solution, but it’s owned and operated by Google, and everything your users do on your website is captured for analysis. As spelled out in their documentation:

reCAPTCHA works best when it has the most context about interactions with your site, which comes from seeing both legitimate and abusive behavior.

Additionally,

reCAPTCHA learns by seeing real traffic on your site.

In a perfect world, Google would only use this data to improve the service. Maybe that’s all they’re doing, but I take my reader’s privacy seriously - more than my own - and I’m genuinely concerned what Google is doing with this enormous corpus of user data capcha’d by these little blue boxes all over the web. They’re more pervasive than Facebook logins and social buttons, and unlike the earlier version, it’s no longer training robots to recognise trains or traffic lights, it’s training computers how to recognise human behaviour.

There’s also the question of how these work if people choose to disable javascript. The theme I’m using relies on more JS than I’d like already, but at least it degrades elegantly. I’m not so sure about recapcha and I can’t find an answer on their website.

It’s looking likely I’m going to have to palm user data off to someone to determine if they’re a robot or not. I’m not happy about it, but it appears to be the price unless I’m willing to sift through dozens of spam comments a day. It wouldn’t be so bad, except Git’s policy of keeping history means that the spam I receive is attached to my site’s repo forever, even if the comment never makes it here.

My final recourse is to try something that I’m guessing won’t work for long. Staticman has a feature that checks for valid form data. The check is basic enough that the field can be present in the data as long as it’s blank. If it has a value set it immediately fails validation. I’ve set a dummy field in the form that needs to be left blank. If a ‘bot fills it in, it should get picked up and fail to submit. I’m not sure how long it will slow them down, but I’m going to give it a shot.

I’ve also disabled the form on posts older than a month, so if you want to comment, do it now!

Update: 24 hours without a spam comment. Success!

One thing that moving away from WordPress means is that I can no longer publish on the go.

I mean, I never really did, but at least I had the option. Now to post I must be in front of my PC with the Hugo software installed and a copy of my repo. I could get the repo on any computer and even install Hugo if I needed to be elsewhere, but my home computer has the key to log into my server, so I’m not making it easy on myself.

I can however, use a portable git client (I’m trying out FastHub for GitHub and write my posts on the go, then tidy and publish them later.

I’m banking on the idea that reducing the barriers to writing will increase the number of posts that get published. We’ll see.

I’m writing this, my 100^th post, from my iPhone. It’s making me dizzy, as the screen jumps with every key press. I may not do this again till there is a native iphone app to do it with.

Congratulations to me anyway.