Dr. Frank's What's-it

Online! It Was Online All Along!

Clive Davis is a great guy and runs one of my all time favorite blogs, so it has always bothered me a bit that he has been unable to leave comments or send trackbacks to this site. I knew it had to be because of a piece of text in my blacklist file that was blocking him by accident, but I have never been able to identify it. Till now, that is: Clive's url is "clivedavis-online.com" and I just realized that somehow the string "online" was on the list. I deleted it, so everything should work just fine now for those wanting to leave comments including the word "online." Knock yourselves out.

This also clears up a mystery from a ways back. A former reader and frequent commenter known as "JB Online" was having trouble posting comments, and thought I had banned him on purpose for some reason. He was kind of mad about it. I emailed back that I hadn't banned him intentionally, but I don't think he believed me because I never heard back from him. I used to like his comments, too. So JB Online, if you're still out there, come on back. If you want.

And that goes for anybody else who has trouble with the comments. If that happens, it is almost certainly some unfortunate coincidence, where something in your text or email or url happens to coincide with a url culled from spam-chunks. The first thing to try is to alter the stuff that has a ".com" or something else that might conceivably find itself in some malicious spam url (e.g., if your website is nakedfemalesxxx.com, try posting without that bit of text...) The Blacklist program allows you ban the spammy ones, but sometimes benign chunks of text slip through, which is what happened with "online."

I am very sorry about that.

Posted by Dr. Frank at January 21, 2006 02:22 AM | TrackBack