upgrade

Have you ever received spam mail? I bet the answer is almost certainly yes. Well unfortunately when you have a feature on a website, such as the comments area on Alpine Web Design, you leave yourself open to receiving spam posts from automated bots that crawl the internet and fill in sign up forms, comment forms, etc…

Although I had anticipated this problem when designing the comments area of the blog, I setup some anti-spam functionality which prevented the comments from being posted live without me having to check each one, I was still required to clear my website database of all these unwanted spam comments each week.

The method I had chosen was intended to be the most unobtrusive for the user and in many ways it does work but in my experience it is far from ideal because you still have to deal with the spam even though it isn’t being published on your website. I am not a big fan of using CAPTCHA, a type of challenge-response image test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. Instead I decided to use a quick login solution to make sure all my comments are coming from real humans.

I have setup the login/register system so that it loads above the page the user is on so that it isn’t a major feature of the website, but is almost hidden until the point where the user actually needs it. This is intended to keep the site as simple and straightforward as possible in terms of usability and navigation to enhance the usability of the website. I have setup the registration procedure to ask for the minimal amount of details possible so as not to put off too many potential users. I know registration will put off some users, as will CAPTCHA, however if someone does want to post a comment I hope I have made the system quick and simple to use so that they will not be discouraged too much. Your feedback is welcomed, or course you will have to register first!