I've added yet another spam prevention method called a "captcha" or "scode." You will notice a small image of 6 characters that need to be entered into the field below it on the comment preview page, just above the submit button. This is yet another attempt to decrease spam.
The image is ment to restrict the ability of comment bots from spamming us. Individuals, who want to take the time, still can, but the bots should at least have a really hard time of breaking in now, Lord willing.
Nothing's perfect thouh, and the downside of the captcha concept is that visually impaired people won't be able to comment on our blogs anymore. I had avoided using this trick for some time because of that reason. If you are visually impaired, please forgive this change. We hope it doesn't have to be permanent.
Thank you all for your patience over the past few weeks.
Maybe it's bad math, but it seems to be in vogue right now for our little community and its server woes. We're moving back to the BigBlueHat server.
What this means is: a little down time in exchange for the ability to use your blog. Not a bad trade-off eh?
Ben's Friends will be down for approximately the next two hours while I move us back. Once we're back there will be a few changes to the system that will hopefully make things better. MT-Blacklist will be turned off, but there will be a new comment moderation feature in place (compliments of ScriptyGoddes).
There will be more info posted when the move is complete. For the time being, please accept my appologies for the misfire and stay tuned for greater things in the future.
Please pray that all goes well.
Ja ne.
As many of you have noticed, Ben's Friends is still having all kinds of problems. It turns out that our 1&1 (at least the package we're on) is rather limited, which has caused a number of problems (mostly with Perl modules).
Due to that, we're probably going to be moving back to the BBH server. When this happens, comments will be disable until I decide on the best option (other than MT-Blacklist) to keep spam down.
I'm sorry for all the trouble this has caused. Thank you all for your patience and encouragement. Please pray that I'll have wisdom and time to make this change soon. I'd like to take Ben's Friends a lot farther for you all. Your prayers go along way.
Thanks again for your patience. I'll keep you posted.
For those who have tried to comment since we moved to the new server, you may have received a 505 error. The error was actually intentional at least while we were at the old server.
Because of some trouble with MT-Blacklist, we were creating an extreme amount of load (CPU/Memory usage) on our old server every time someone commented. Because that continued to happen, we were forced to take down the comments script, hence the error. After moving to the new server I neglected to put the script back.
It is now back in place, so things should work normally. Sorry for the trouble.
The move to the new server is complete. We're now running on a preview hosting account I picked up sometime last year from 1and1.
The move went fairly well except for the fact that when I got home from Port City Java I found that I wasn't able to access the new location. I've contacted Charter to see if they can do anything about. In the meantime, it looks like I'll continue to be a wireless hobo.
Enjoy the new server, and please let me know if you find any bugs.