Just in case anyone was curious

…which they’re probably weren’t, but here’s a section of what the control panel looks like in WordPress.

moderation_queue.jpg (30K)

2328 spam comments means that that page was three and a half megs. Imagine if I’d been on dialup.

For readers under the age of 25, dialup was back when computers used to talk to each other over the phone. No, really. They’d make this annoying squeaky squawky noise at each other, and that would apparently mean something. You had to plug them into the wall socket. For readers under the age of 20, wall sockets were not originally for ADSL, but for an old sort of phone which didn’t come with an aerial.

January 24, 2006 · Filed under Uncategorized

8 Comments

  1. Michael Lefevre Said,

    January 24, 2006 @ 1:55 pm

    Plug them in? Plug them in? In my day the phone was plugged into the wall socket and you connected up by placing the handset onto the acoustic coupler…

  2. fridgemagnet Said,

    January 24, 2006 @ 1:59 pm

    well in MY day you had to pick up the phone yourself and go “prZZZTWAAAWbrbrbpschrt” into the receiver based on what you saw on the screen, and then put what you heard back onto a punched card

    in fact we just had tin cans on a string as well

  3. Michael Lefevre Said,

    January 24, 2006 @ 2:49 pm

    I understand that the modern geek equivalent of making noises into a phone is to use a cut end of fibre and a laser pointer.

  4. Alex Cline Said,

    January 25, 2006 @ 1:25 am

    Comment spam eats ass. I heartily recommend SpamKarma. It automates all that crap for you without false positives.

  5. Wolfie Said,

    January 26, 2006 @ 3:30 pm

    I heartily recommend the bot-check plug-in old chap, that will see off the marauding swine.

  6. fridgemagnet Said,

    January 26, 2006 @ 3:34 pm

    Oh, it traps them all okay, it’s just a pain clearing the queue. Maybe I should just auto-delete them.

  7. Wolfie Said,

    January 27, 2006 @ 11:14 am

    The bot-check plug-in will mean that they can’t be posted by the script in the first place. There are some scripts that can read the image file but fortunately they are few and far between.

  8. chio Said,

    January 29, 2006 @ 1:26 am

    It’s not the spam that pisses me off about WordPress, it’s the “happy birthdays” on the Dashboard and the way it says “Howdy!” to me when I log in. Grr.