Anonymous comments

[andrewducker]

Turned anonymous comments on last night, screened, and with a captcha enabled.

Turned it off this morning, having received about 20 Chinese spam comments.

I'd love to let people comments without an account, but not if I have to spend a ton of time clearing up.

Comments

[f4f3]

At least you encourage me to log in :)

[cmcmck]

Bloody annoying.

It's why I don't allow anonymous comments any more as I got the spam plus the transphobia. :o(

[andrewducker]

I'm sorry.

[bens_dad]

I'd love to let people comments without an account

I have never tested it on Dreamwidth, but IIRC LiveJournal allowed any OpenID (or possibly OpenAuth) account to comment. This may allow people to comment as facebook, google, github etc. users, not just as a dreamwidth user.

[andrewducker]

Yup: https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=9

So if people are using OpenID and have an email address then they can comment.

[bens_dad]

I use my github account to access another service via OpenID, but I don't know the magic url, so am failing to use it to post this comment. :-(

[cellio]

I got that too (well, mine were Japanese, but same problem), and discovered a setting for which type of captcha to show anonymous commenters. I switched it from text to image and the comments stopped, at least for now, but it's an arms race so I assume that will stop working again at some point.

The comments I got were utter nonsense. I don't understand what the attack model was, and why the person kept it up after the first hundred didn't show up. Weird. (Mine all came from two IP addresses; it wasn't distributed.)

[andrewducker]

You're right, Japanese!

And it, weirdly, looked like someone training a system to send emails, or do tasks. There was no attack vector.