China’s idiosyncratic Internet is causing me a bit of grief today, with posts getting lost and access being denied and a lot of time being wasted. So strange, how one minute it’s not working, the next it’s fine. Totally unpredictable. I’ll be here another five days, and my time on the Net will be very limited. Sporadic posting at best.
A troll has been dropping incredibly obscene comments all over my site, and I apologize for any offense taken. I’m trying to delete them as they come, but don’t have the time to police the site adequately. Thanks for your patience.
1
By dave
Richard,
The MovableType plugin ‘Blacklist’ allows blocking of posts by keywords. It can prevent posts with certain words or phrases from being posted at all, and it can also be used to clean up old postings which contain dodgy keywords.
It’s downloadable from here [jayallen.org] and it’s a very small download; about 30k.
It solved a particular comment-spam problem I had in a flash and it’s simple to set up. There’s also a bunch of rules which come with it, so you don’t have to start it completely from scratch.
regards,
dave
March 10, 2004 @ 6:29 pm | Comment
2
By Zhang Li En
No worries Richard. I don’t think anyone is going to blame you for those posts. I’m sure that we all appreciate the current circumstances, and understand that you’re not able to be as vigilant as normal in the maintenance of this site.
March 10, 2004 @ 8:34 pm | Comment
3
By Adam Morris
Why is it the “Chinese” internet? Almost four years of use and I’ve never had any difficulty accessing internet in internet bars.
The Internet at my school that’s run by westerners is more “idiosyncratic” than those in the bars. The few times I’ve used it in business centers has been less than satisfactory.
March 11, 2004 @ 5:14 pm | Comment
4
By richard
Adam, did you see Phil’s recent posts about his ownbroadband problems? I don’t blame “China,” but I have had serious connection problems all through this trip, even right now, just as I did when I was living in Beijing. In 2003 I posted frequently about watching in rapt silence as the little Microsoft icon in the upper-right-hand corner would spin ’round and ’round, but no site opening. It just took me about 4 minutes to get onto this site from a Shanghai Internet cafe, far faster than in Beijing yesterday. This is not a judgment call, it’s just a fact of life that there can be broadband and connections here. And it is idiosyncratic; yesterday I finally gave up after more than 40 minutes of tying to log onto my bog to post. Then an hour later I got right on. This sort of thing never happened to me anywhere else. Observation about China’s broadband, not a criticism of the country.
March 11, 2004 @ 9:06 pm | Comment
5
By richard
Thanks for the plugin address Dave. Once I get home I will install it fast.
March 11, 2004 @ 9:07 pm | Comment
6
By Alba
To Adam:
as far as ‘Chinese’ internet is concerned…I haven’t been able to access any blogspot blogs at all, including my own, since arriving here… I found it quite puzzling as to why blogspot blogs would be filtered but it seems that they are. All is well now though as I have set up a new one with another server, and it has no problems loading…
btw Richard, cool blog…love the design.
March 15, 2004 @ 10:56 pm | Comment