drupal

Over the past few evenings I have successfully upgraded the site to the latest release of Drupal, now at 6.2!

Having hit a few speed bumps with incompatible modules it's taken a little while to get back to the level of functionality there before the upgrade. That said, it was a necessary upgrade for many reasons most obviously to me being that of the hundreds of fake user accounts that have been springing up on a daily basis. At points during any given day there were tens of new users accounts being registered every hour. To combat this problem I have introduced the reCaptcha module that makes use of the reCaptcha web service for 'human' recognition versus the annoying scripts that have been invading the site. At the same time, and I apologize to all this affects but I have removed all user accounts that weren't personally known to me or accessed within the last 12-months. Please re-join whenever you get the chance and again sorry for the inconvenience.

As part of this upgrade you will also notice that I have included a rating system to allow visitors to rate the posts and comments that they read. This will hopefully add to the user experience and encourage participation. Along those same lines I have decided to open up the comments to allow 'anonymous' input while utilizing the reCaptcha service to 'fingers-crossed' dispel any and all scripted abuse that has been witnessed in the past. I'll let this ride for a time and if I see any abuse occurring regroup and decided on what to do then. All comments, just like posts will continue to be moderated by myself and require approval prior to public display.

Well that's it for now! It's been a while and a lot has happened but without trying to dissect my life, my work and everything in the middle I am going to push forward with a new revitalized blogging schedule. On the list of topics that I have running around in my head at the moment are hardware upgrades to the site infrastructure (remember this - Old Hardware Post) and the reconfiguration and introduction of load-balancing and replication. These and more will be coming very soon.

Dave

Let me begin by stating that on the whole I have been using the same version of Drupal for well over a year with zero functionality or stability issues to report. Quite simply, it works!! As a firm believer in the old saying, "if it ain't broke don't try to fix it!" I have chosen to leave it alone during this time. That said I had a pressing reason to perform an upgrade for some time now in addressing a very annoying condition.........let me explain.

Over the past several months I have been getting seriously plagued with spam comments and well, just 'not-nice' crap including porn messages, drug solicitations and others. While the content has been controlled to sitting in the approval queue for comments, it has nevertheless been a painstaking process for me going through and deleting several pages of junk at a time. While I know I could have saved myself time in the long run by including a captcha module several months back I just didn't have the time.

Well, the problem is now fixed, or so I hope!

This past weekend I finally sat down and spent the time needed to upgrade the site to the latest version of Drupal (the content engine on which Poscribes runs, if you didn't already know) including the captcha module to make automated submission of comments from the script kiddies out there and my job in moderating comments that much easier.

After 2-days I am happy to report that I have zero 'crap' sitting in the comment approval queue. While I am optimistic this may have solved things for now I will continue monitoring the queue for any problems that may arise.

Other than some layout changes with the administration features for Drupal, and without having dived into the code, I really don't see a lot of changes with this version. My only hope is that it remains as solid and reliable as the version I just chose to leave behind and of course I did a complete back up should anything go wrong.

So far, so good as they say and let's hope it stays that way!

I apologize to those of you who have tried to register recently. I have been experiencing a few issues with my automated email attendant which will be resolved this evening for sure. Normal service can be expected to resume from tomorrow morning.