Good Housekeeping

Well, some of you must have noticed by now – anonymous comments are no longer allowed on G&T, and you have to register an account in order to post on the site.

We didn’t want to have to do this – since the September 2003 relaunch when we added the comments system, we wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to post on here. And in the main, it’s not caused us too many problems. But recently, despite protection, comment spam has been getting through onto the site – and the more spam that got through, the more it encouraged the spambots.

So – for the time being, at least – you need to register an account with us in order to comment. I hope that it won’t put anyone off – we only require a name and email address, rather than the shitloads of personal information that some sites pointlessly need, and of course we won’t give it out to anyone else. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be your real name, and the email address can be any old webmail address, as long as it reaches you. It’s not that much of a barrier.

It had to be said, however, that a nice side effect of requiring people to register is that it stops certain commenters using loads of different names to post. Within reason, we don’t mind what your name is (providing it’s not passing yourself off as someone else, or a name which is specifically offensive to one person) – but it’s polite to stick to one name, really. The new system will ensure that will happen – although as I say, it’s a nice side-effect, rather than the reason for the policy change.

Whilst we’re on the subject of spam, some of you may have noticed that our Wiki has been temporarily shut down. As some of you have pointed out, the spam problem over there had got, erm, beyond a joke – the whole thing needed a proper overhaul, to get rid of the spam, stick in some anti-spam plug-ins, and upgrade the software. We haven’t got time to do that at the moment – we’re working on something else for the site – but once that’s done, we’ll take a look and get it back up and running again, hopefully sometime in June.

It’s fair enough to say, though, that DwarfWiki, even before the huge spam problem, had lost rather a lot of momentum. If any of you have any ideas for how to get the thing moving again, then by all means stick them below.

Boring post then, I’m afraid. Sorry about that. Rather more exciting stuff soon, however – and maybe even a “soon” that is shorter than two years…