I saw an interesting article on Yahoo! the other day. It appears that someone at Carnegie Mellon came up with the idea to use a CAPTCHA script to mask e-mail addresses. Basically, they provide you with special link code to put in place of your normal mailto link. You can use the link anyway you want, but the script generates some HTML code automatically that looks similar to:

user<a href="http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=01quxf658CWzRNQC34kj75Ug==&c=5Sc_I7orZzXLkOX6E7fontrPSKXj6NS2QC0a-5mV5Gk=" onclick="window.open('http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=01quxf658CWzRNQC34kj75Ug==&c=5Sc_I7orZzXLkOX6E7fontrPSKXj6NS2QC0a-5mV5Gk=', '', 'toolbar=0,scrollbars=0,location=0,statusbar=0,menubar=0,resizable=0,width=500,height=300'); return false;" title="Reveal this e-mail address">...</a>@example.com

In the example above, the whole e-mail address would actually be username@example.com, but the rest of the username is obscured by the script. Of course, they also supply you with just the address to the CAPTCHA page, so that you can build your own link any way you want.

The link, in turn, leads to a page with a CAPTCHA script. Once you correctly answer the CAPTCHA question, you’re lead to another page with the complete e-mail address. The script is called Mailhide, and it appears to be a completely free utility. It’s such a simple idea that I can’t believe no one thought of this before.

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I’ve recently become aware of an issue with managing comments in Wordpress 2.5. I’m not sure if it’s a bug or if it’s simply a poorly implemented “feature”, but I’m going to call it a bug.

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On our sister site CenterNetworks, we use the open source content management system (CMS) Drupal. I’ve used nearly every CMS package, both free and the systems costing large sums of money and Drupal is my favorite.

On CN we get hammered with spam every day. So much spam that I had to turn off comments after three months because every post (some 2000+) gets hit.

One thing I’ve noticed is that within moments of posting some new content, spams begin to come in. Not minutes, hours or days, but moments. And after doing some research into our system and into the way Drupal handles content, I’ve realized why this happens.

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