Checksum Arcanius

Apparently, trackbacks don’t go through the same checks as other comments, and spam can sneak through, even containing such words as “party”, “poker” and “online.” I don’t get many real trackbacks, so I think my solution will be to simply turn them off. I don’t feel like figuring out how they are suppsoed to work and how I can get WordPress to filter them, so it seems the best solution.

Update: I just noticed that, while I get emails about these trackbacks, they don’t actually show up as comments. Hm. Anyone know anything about this?

An earlier question and Bernie’s response led me to snoop around the WordPress source code, where I found a section that set the non-caching rules and had the page always instantly expire. A comment in the code said that it would be presumptuous to assume that WordPress is the only thing that can change the site… however, I update often enough (at least I used to…) that I don’t feel it is all that presumptive, and at any rate, I am willing to presume to get rid of bad side effects like missing comments, jumping to the top of the page after clicking back, etc. I hope the user experience is greatly improved. Let me know if anything isn’t working.

So… its been a while. And truthfully, I haven’t been all that busy. I’ve just been lazy, and out of the posting habit. A full catch-up will have to wait until a later time, as I have a test in my philosophy of science class that I can’t help but feel somewhat ill-prepared for in about an hour, and I have the intention of sneaking in some last minute studying.

Everyone seems to be getting older these days. First Theo, and now my good friend Kat is 21 today. Now she can go party hardy, although I suspect that she has somewhat more important things on her mind right now.

And now, off to eat.

Last weekend, I participated in the MIT Mystery Hunt, an annual puzzler extravaganza put on by the most famous of nerd schools. My participation came via Scott, a friend who currently attends said instution. My team-by-proxy was “death-from-above”, and though I directly helped solve only one puzzle out of more than 100, my “team” solved 79, placing solidly above some teams, but solidly below the top-tier teams this year.

Here’s a look at the one I helped with, called “Logomania”:

To solve it, the Washington sub-team figured out the name of the company associated with each logo, then we took the first letter of each compnay and made a sentence out of it, which pointed us to the “company of the sixth logo,” or N-Star, which was the answer to the puzzle.

Sounds complicated? It was. And this was also, I assure you, one of the easiest puzzles in the game. Oh, and if you read Bobby‘s AIM profile, yes, “(03:33:48) Ryan McElroy: I’m a whore barbie ok” really is a quote from me, said at 3:33 am. It was an attempt to solve another puzzle, called “ten times a second.” My guess was way off base, in case you were wondering.

I’ve gotten myself onto a late schedule recently. Today, I had dinner at 10 pm; this after missing a 9:30 class in the morning. Thus, new year’s resolutions are upcoming; one will be a midnight bed time, mostly, I think. Something like that. Anyway, this 2:30 stuff just doesn’t cut it.

The usual experience when submitting forms and recieving errors, is that one can click “Back” (or, as I most often do, hit my backspace key), and the just-submitted form will still have the info you just submitted entered in, so all you have to do is change the offending field, and resubmit. Take, for example, my comment spam protection idea – now implemented by several people. If a real human forgets to check the “I am human” checkbox, they see a rather blank looking page with the text “Error: You are inhuman scum!”

“How dare you insult me, Arcanius!” They wonder aloud, as they click back (or if they are cool, like me, they use their backspace key), to figure out why I am insulting them. But then – gasp – the 15 page comment they meticulously crafted in the small textarea box is gone – apparently forever.

I have lost more than one comment this way to wordpress. The question is, where does it go? Its not just a Firefox thing – IE looses the comment too. I suspect that it is related to the die() command, but I have no idea why. Or perhaps someone more skilled than I am in the behavior of WordPress, or Web Forms, or something or another, can inform me as to what is really going on here.