A wondrously deafening silence

Disconnected call

From the Center for Democracy and Technology:

The House today approved, by unanimous voice vote, legislation that permanently prevents consumer’s phone numbers from being automatically removed from the FTC’s “Do Not Call” list. Without the legislation, those numbers would be scrubbed from the list after five years. CDT supports the elimination of the five year expiration rule. A companion bill in the Senate is waiting for a floor vote. The House bill is H.R.3541; the Senate bill is S.2096

(This was actually posted by CDT on the 11th when it actually happened. I’m slow.)

Hopefully the Senate will have the sense to do the obvious, but it probably wouldn’t hurt to poke your Senatoid (for those in the U.S.) just in case.

Related posts

Akismet rocks; upgrades bring hiccups

Spamwall by freezelight
Over the weekend I finally found time for a major set of upgrades to all of the family blogs. One of many impetuses for this was the vast ocean of comment spam that I was dealing with from my blog. I had a CAPTCHA plugin running on this blog which wasn’t always easy for human users to deal with, and which was largely failing to keep out the spam. I was still getting 50-100 e-mails a day announcing the arrival of yet another bit of blog spam, and it sucked.

As part of the upgrade I turned on the Akismet anti-spam plugin that now comes standard with WordPress, and man is it wonderful. In the few days that it’s been working, it’s (correctly) identified roughly 100 spam messages per day, keeping them out of my mail spool and management work flow on the blog.

Unfortunately I only half turned off the old CAPTCHA plugin. The plugin code was all turned off, but the formatting of the comment submission area still had a (now empty) box for the authentication image, and the box for you to type in the code (which you couldn’t see). It turns out that you could post a comment ignoring the code, but that was hardly obvious from a user standpoint, and happily one of our regular readers pointed out the problem.

I believe the problem is now fixed, and I would be grateful if a few folks would post a randomoid comment on this post just to verify that all is now well.

If the Akismet tool continues to do such a good job, I’d like to turn off moderation altogether so that people’s comments will appear immediately. Stay tuned!

Thanks to freezelight for the cool photo.

Related posts