Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today I am going into the long-overdue topic of managing my site. Let’s get started.
The Silent Years
For years now, I’ve used this site as a place where I write about anything vaguely computer related I’ve been doing. I aim for 300-2000 words depending on how rambely I get. It keeps me thinking. Occasionally I need to teach myself a new skill. If a week is too slow, I’ll add filler I hope will be informative and/or jabber about plans for whatever the next phase entails.
But before today, my audience has been silent through a fault of my own. I can’t receive feedback unless the person offering it knows me on another platform. That’s a problem. I should have fixed it long ago, but even getting one-way posting online was draining, to say the least, and I got busy with other topics.
Registration
I started work this week by viewing the site’s back end while logged out. Nowhere did I see a way to make an account. Back in the admin panel, I found the first important click: Settings -> General -> Membership has a checkbox called “Anyone can register.” I enabled it.
Immediately, the login page had a new option to make an account, and I tried to do so with an e-mail I have for making alt accounts. Something in the site suspected me of being a bot.
Several hours of pushing myself to investigate later, I disabled a bunch of plugins and made my account. With the help of my good friend, Commander Stryker, I narrowed the problematic plugin down to MOJO Marketplace when it was the only candidate disabled.
Spam Protection Without Captcha
While solving the “suspected bot” problem, this week, I found an option in a forums plugin to use a Captcha service to protect against bad bots spamming my site. Captcha tests are often used to present bots with a difficult challenge humans can pass without much trouble.
Unfortunately, these tests are obnoxious to solve at best and needlessly discriminate against the disabled at worst. As computer science advances, this approach necessarily gets more difficult to keep ahead of automatic solving. These days, Google has a near monopoly on this technology, but with their track record of grossly abusing privacy, I’d rather limit their active role in this blog to directing traffic here as I am able.
The other option is a similar, but service called hCaptcha. All I have to say right now is that recognized their logo from when I recently solved one of their challenges. They are a topic worthy of a future post, though not an immediate priority.
More interesting to me is the idea of a honeypot. Instead of inconveniencing humans and bots alike in a prove-you-are-human style test, honeypots lay traps invisible to [well behaved] humans [who aren’t poking around in the HTML] while most bots will happily give themselves away by interacting with them. Again, this is a late development, so if I learn more, it will need to be covered in another post.
Takeaway
There’s a lot more to running a WordPress Blog well than I’ve been doing. I’m far from over.
Final Question
At long last, you should finally be able to respond: Do you even try to answer Final Questions?