Metahyphal Blogulating: Changes to Anonymous Posting and New Icon
Readers may have noticed two changes to this blog today. Since it hasn't changed that much in the previous year, here's the story on the disabling of anonymous comments and the appearance of a new icon/link at the foot of each entry.
For whatever reason, Google has picked up a recent entry and turned it into a featured blog link on its search engine. That's great for increasing good traffic, but it has also had the effect of attracting what look like a bunch of spambots. There have been a couple of them, it seems, crawling over the place today and attempting to leave numerous advertising spams. Each time an attempt is made, I get a moderation email notifying me of a new anonymous comment. I had scores of them after just a few hours, so I've decided to turn off anonymous commenting for the time being in the hopes that these notices won't turn into a flood in my inbox. I don't know for how long this will last, and I may or may not decide to turn it back on. Multiple anonymous comments can cause some confusion and, with the advent of OpenID and the like, it isn't all that necessary, anyhow.
The other change is the inclusion of an icon and link for Sphere that appears at the bottom right of each entry. Sphere is a free service that connects readers of an article they find interesting with other content sources containing related information, including blogs and mainstream media. Try it out; I did some surfing on it this morning and found it interesting enough to include it here. It looks benign as far as I can tell, so I'll give it a few weeks and see if people are using it.
If you were wondering, now you know.
