Spam on blogs is completely out of control.  I’m talking- everyday is a Red Day. 

Initially, I had a forum enabled on the website which lasted approximately twelve hours before I had to disable it due to registration/comment abuse of the red-light district in Amsterdam variety.  Apparently the spammers have been busy over the years writing sophisticated bot-software which combs the Internet for form fields and proceeds to rapid fire information into the fields in hopes of publishing marketing links to genitalia growth products.

I had been reserved to manual acceptance of comments so that I could filter through them individually, but I should have some time this weekend to look into plug-ins which support “Captcha”.  In lay-mans terms, Captcha generates those squirrely looking, sometimes hard-to-read characters on websites that you then have to re-enter in order to prove that you are a carbon-based life-form.  This is purely speculative on my part, but it does seem that the spammers have even made strides against Captcha in recent years as it seems that the characters are growing increasing difficult to read over time.  So much so, that often times I apparently provide the incorrect response to captcha forms upon which it rudely clears all form fields.

I also have been busy working with my new Windows Home Server which was a Happy Birthday to Me gift.  It has a ton of exciting features, but one in which I am planning to also delve into this weekend is the Microsoft IIS server.  Windows Home Server comes with a web-hosting capability which is meant for remote access to the server, but could easily be extended to support general web-hosting.  As WordPress (this blog software) runs on Microsoft ASP.net, I’m going to attempt to transplant my blog from the godaddy host site it is running on right now to the Windows Home Server if my office for the sake of saving $5 / month.  If all goes well, come Monday, you shouldn’t notice any difference.

Hopefully my DSL can handle intermittent web hits without introducing dynamic latency on my Xbox Live connection.  :-p