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Submitted by Jeremy McNaughton on March 22, 2008 - 5:37am.
A few new features introduced to the site tonight.
- Cancel your own account
- Moderate comments in your own blog
- Trackbacks
- reCAPTCHA
We also added a log in link where the log out link is like Alex suggested. Mike McGregor also did some work on the About LondonCommons.net book page.
Cancel your own account
From now on, if you decide that you no longer want to participate on LondonCommons.net you can delete your account without the assistance of a moderator. To delete your account click on the edit tab on your account page, and use the "Delete my account" button at the bottom of the form.
All of your content will be moved to a special "Deleted Accounts" user. Your comments will still have your name on them.
All of your private messages and account settings will be gone forever.
Moderate comments in your own blog
Previously, unlike almost all other free blogs, users could not delete unwanted comments from in their own blogs. This has not been fixed, and users can take responsibility for moderation in their blogs.
Be careful when using this feature. All replies to a comment are deleted as well. Deleted comments are gone forever, including the replies that get deleted too.
To delete a comment, click on the "delete" link at the bottom of the comment.
Trackbacks
Blogs now support the Trackback standard. Trackbacks are automatic notifications that your blog has been linked to. They provide a way for responding to someone else's blog in your own blog. They also work for blogs outside of LondonCommons.net.
Say you read an interesting blog about penguins on example.com. The blog entry at example.com will have a Trackback URL. You can respond to the blog about penguins in your blog here, and paste the Trackback URL into the field on the authoring form. When you're down, example.com will be notified that you've linked to its blog about penguins and automatically link to your new blog entry.
Trackbacks work both ways, so your blog will automatically display links to blogs that trackback to it. Here's Wikipedia's article about Trackback.
reCAPTCHA
The account creation page now uses a CAPTCHA test from reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA uses scanned words from old books that didn't get converted into text properly by the scanning software. Hopefully that means the spam bots won't be able to read the words either.
reCAPTCHA has the added benefit of an optional audio CAPTCHA for people with vision problems. It also helps the Internet Archive scan old books with human assistance for its scanning software.
(2 votes)
Trackback URL for this post:
http://londoncommons.net/trackback/5724
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trackback spam
We've been getting a great deal of trackback spam. In fact, the only trackbacks we've gotten have been spam. Unfortunately it doesn't seem as though the spam filter is learning how to automatically identify the spam either.
There's a setting to disable one-way trackbacks. It's supposed to disallow trackbacks from sites that don't actually link to the LC. That might help with the spam but I haven't turned it on yet because I can't find any info on how it's supposed to work.
I hope we can keep the trackback feature. It's a great way to respond to something from a different site in your own blog. There's a similar tool that allows this called Pingback. It's supposed to be less prone to spam, but I don't think it's as widespread. Also the current Drupal implementation of Pingback needs anonymous comments enabled.
Trackback spam
I just noticed that the trackbacks are attracting quite a bit of spam... It would be great if folks could flag this as they see it!
-30-
Mike.
"Debout les damnés de l'Université."
-=There is no Cabal, Long live the Cabal=-
My Photos
agreed
That would be great. The integration between the trackback and spam modules seems to be really basic at best.
Users can delete trackbacks in their own blogs however, if they notice spam there.
"this has not been fixed"
when you say: "unlike almost all other free blogs, users could not delete unwanted comments from in their own blogs. This has not been fixed, "
do you mean that 'This has been fixed'?
-30-
Mike.
"Debout les damnés de l'Université."
-=There is no Cabal, Long live the Cabal=-
My Photos
typo
That's a typo, it should read "now" instead of "not".
menu changes
A quick note, that the menu at the top has been changed a bit.. the top links (organize, share, etc) have all been changed to point to specific pages, instead of pointing back to the front page.
the "recent posts" has been changed, so its now the "read and write" link.. also its been changed to a more elaborate version, that shows both user specific unread, and groups.. hopefully that will encourage folks to start making groups and posting group content more..
.
\x69 \x20 \x61 \x6d \x20 \x31 \x33 \x33 \x37finding recent post just got a bit more confusing...
I could see new users and people who miss this thread having trouble finding and/or getting to the recent post page if the link title makes no reference to recent posts. I think it may rely on people stumbling upon it by chance. Hell, you just explained it to me not even two hours ago and it took me a couple minutes to find it...
Would it be worth having a redundant link within the 'read and write' menu titled 'recent posts' with a note at the top of the recent post page explaining that the 'read and write' link will bring users there in one click for next time?
on a comp1337ly unrelated note, I'll just take this chance to encourage everyone to check out the Spacebucks Rankings for no particular reason...
-30-
Mike.
"Debout les damnés de l'Université."
-=There is no Cabal, Long live the Cabal=-
My Photos
SPACEBUCKS!!
few things that have changed regarding the spacebucks point system..
"give spacebucks" now works.. "spacebucks login" does not. we upgraded to a much newer version..
also the error of losing a spacebuck when you edit a post should be gone..
.
\x69 \x20 \x61 \x6d \x20 \x31 \x33 \x33 \x37Hari-Kari Feature
Ut oh. Cancel your own account? I'm likely to do it without meaning to
Does it get backed up temporarily just in case?
---
From My Bottom Step
personal opinion from the perspective of a London, Ontario community activist
gone is gone
The site will keep your content (under the special user "Deleted Accounts") and your comments (still under your name).
But everything else is gone, forever.
It does ask you for confirmation, so you can't accidently delete it.
Unlike Facebook, we don't keep your account on file after you cancel it.
anonymous postings
You had mentioned once to me that you guys were looking into having a feature that if you deleted your account you could have the option of having your name on submissions to be listed by anonymous.
Any possiablity of that?
thanks
anonymous
it was originally set to show up as anonymous when a user deletes their account, but the possible confusion of anonymous postings led to its own formal "deleted account".
just don't want people to think there's some glitch that allows for anonymous postings, or there's some secret way people are posting without signing in..
its the same thing, just instead of "anonymous" its "deleted user" (or whatever it was called)
.
\x69 \x20 \x61 \x6d \x20 \x31 \x33 \x33 \x37not with comments
Comments still display your name after you delete your account. We could possibly change it. I'd rather not myself, but we can talk about it at a meeting when we finally have a meeting.
anon.
I think I like the idea of keeping the names with comments (and all psots for that matter) after an account is deleted... I think that keeping accountable for their posts is a good thing, and hopefully it will encourage people to think long and hard before hitting that submit button on something that may come back and bite them later.
Really, when you think about it, with sites like the internet archive
there is no way to compleatly erase anything posted even if it can be
deleted from the site.
As it is now, deleting an account seems to disable to 'track' posts made by that account... People have started fresh by deleting their original account and creating a new one. If someone makes the connection between the two accounts and want's to dig hard enough, posts can be dregged back up, but the time, effort and obscurity of past burried post are probabably enough of a deterrant. But at the same time the possibility of being held accontable for old post is there. I think that for most (though not all) people, this and having their real name visible to an audiance of their peers is enough of a deterrent when it comes to being a compleat fuckwad...
-30-
Mike.
"Debout les damnés de l'Université."
-=There is no Cabal, Long live the Cabal=-
My Photos