Crown and Cutlass Blog

As you may have noticed, we recently had some issues with our wiki.  We were using a wiki system that we could install from the web host’s control panel.  However, it did not get automatically updated.  I guess someone exploited a security flaw in the wiki software and the host noticed unusual load on the server machine from our account.  Rather than continue to mess around with our own wiki, we decided to just transition over to a new Crown and Cutlass wiki hosted by SF.net.

The other day I got the content from the old site running on a local linux box so I started transitioning content to the new wiki.  I also wrote a PHP script to forward links from the old wiki to the new wiki pages.  I don’t have all the content there yet, but I think it will be fairly painless to move it over.  This is also a good opportunity for us to flush out some old stuff from the wiki and update the content.  If you notice a missing page or have questions about the wiki, leave a comment here or email me.

When we originally set up this blog, we had all comments go into the moderation queue so that we could catch spam or inappropriate comments.  After a few weeks, we started getting dozens of spam comments a day, so Collin installed the reCAPTCHA plugin.  We both liked the idea of helping to digitize books and get rid of our spam at the same time.  However, the spam comments kept appearing in our moderation queue so ever few months one of us would have to go clear out hundreds of spam comments (it even broke a thousand at least once).  That was annoying but not bad enough that either of us cared enough to figure it out.

The other day, I finally got tired of the spam and read some of the reCAPTCHA support forum posts and think we got the problem figured out.  It sounds like reCAPTCHA allows comments to go through that fail the CAPTCHA but it will mark the comment as spam automatically.  I guess WordPress was putting the comments into the moderation queue before reCAPTCHA could mark them as spam though.  Anyway, I hope I really got it right and we won’t all of a sudden get flooded with spam comments.  So far so good…