artiss.blog

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  • Spammers are really, really stupid

    I get the occasional bit of spam via the comments on this site. However, all have to be authorised by myself so I don’t allow any thorough. I’ve now added reCaptcha to the comments section and added a personal message stating that nothing will be displayed if it’s spam. Never-the-less I still get it. Now, reCaptcha is rather good and I can’t believe they’ve found an automated way of getting around it ( I use it on the BMTG site and it isn’t bypassed). If that’s the case, they’re typing things in manually, surely knowing nothing will come of it.

    Yet my contact form never gets any spam. I’ve only recently added any kind of captcha and it’s not as sophisticated as reCaptcha. Is that because it only gets sent to an individual and isn’t potentially displayed on a website?

    My favourite, though, is the BMTG site. I have 3 contact forms on the site – a guest book entry (publishes on the site, but only after being approved), customer form (where they can send their details to the membership secretary) and contact form (where they can contact various members of management). Based on what I said initially, you can probably guess that it’s the Guest Book they target. And you’re right.

    I have an easy-to-use switch which allows me to turn reCaptcha on and off for each of the forms, and I only have it turned on for the Guest Book. If I turn it off I literally get flooded. Why? What is the point? Nothing gets through and it’s a monumental waste of their time, surely? Because the Captcha in this case is fooling them, it must be an automated method being used – that might explain why no matter what messages I use, the message isn’t getting through.

    Having said that, if it is automated, why doesn’t it target the other contact forms?

  • BMTG upgrades to Deoxys

    Earlier this year I made the decision to stop updating the BMTG site as-and-when and more formally as packages. Yesterday I launched the 4th such package – Deoxys.

    Unlike some of my other packages which have had more visible changes, this is more “back end”. Having said that, to me, it’s exciting stuff. The site is performing more caching and I’ve completely re-written most of the MySQL – it’s more efficient and protected against SQL injection (I hope).

    There’s also detection of MySQL failures – when this happens a message bar appears at the top of each page indicating that a problem is occuring and that the site may be affected. The site pages are then designed to degrade gracefully – in other words, either cope with the lack of database access (easier for some pages) or simply display an appropriate message to indicate that no information is currently unavailable. In the past any database problems have simply lead to the site erroring and generally looking shabby.

    Additionally, I’ve added some flags to the back-end database. These indicate either a major problem or that the site is undergoing maintenace – I can then flick these flags on when required and a message will appear on the site. The maintenance is particularly handy to turn on whilst I’m upgrading the site.

    Lastly, and one of the few visible changes, I updated the member profiles – they’re a bit plainer than before but I think they work a lot more effectively now, as they’re less “fussy”.

    Now I’ve started work on the Eevee package – I’ve already written the maintenance changes (including the width of the pages being increased, whilst still ensuring that a horizontal scrollbar doesn’t appear on 800 pixel wide monitors), but the main changes is to the online shop, which helps to generate some much-needed cash for the society.

    Meantime, if you can guess (no looking on Wikipedia!) the naming convention I’m using then… you’re sad. Ok, that makes me sad too. And Catherine Furber, who also knew it.

  • Gardening

    Not a word you’ll hear from me very often, but I was doing it this afternoon. We even went to the garden centre and bought some flowers (pansies, for ultimate comedy) and herbs.

    My gran was a keen gardener – flowers and fruit & veg – but I’ve never been. I’ve picked up a bit from her, but I have a bad way with them. Basically, they die at my hands.

    So we’ll only have to see how it goes. I have loads of seed packets but they all need planting April-time which is no good now.

    But at least those herb pots that I bought 15 years ago are now in use 😉

  • I love Family Guy

    There, I said it. And not in THAT way either.

    I hadn’t watched it until I saw Blue Harvest. I’ve now got the PVR recording any episodes on TV and I love them. This morning I ate my breakfast whilst audibly laughing out loud at Stewie taking off the opening credits to Police Squad. Genius.

    I love the randomness of it – especially when they combine that with pop culture references. In one episode Chris is dragged from the supermarket into a A-Ha video. It’s not relevant to the episode and no reference is made to it again. Random but hilarious.

    It’s great when you find something new to really like – especially if it’s damn funny. Of course it’s also rude in a way that The Simpsons and Futurama would like to be but isn’t.

  • The Family IT Guy

    The Family IT Guy

    I visited my brother-in-laws yesterday (I mentioned that in my previous post). My wife had mentioned to me that their PC was running very slow and was very noisy. Now I know they’re not overly IT literate, so I thought I’d help out.

    My external 2.5 hard drive was packed full of software, I had a PC toolkit with me and a box full of hardware goodies. And a pencil and paper.

    (more…)