Alex Harries's diary

I know I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm getting bored of having a spam-bot trying to advertise websites offering videos and images of a certain, ahem, "type" of kinky activity. What's even worse is it seems to be happening more on one of my blog entries than anywhere else on the site - is it something I'm writing about? Something in my side bar's "about me" text? Whatever it is, I seem to be attracting this kinky, apparently Russian computer to my blog.

Still, it's nice to know someone's reading... ;o)

Anyway, as of tonight, I've finally got round to enforcing the no BB code and HTML rule in website comments - comments with some types of web address in them, or some types of BB code, will come back with an error message and explain what you're doing wrong (it's unlikely you'll accidentally put these codes into your comment, so most people should never see this error).

Some HTML and BB code won't trigger the spam filter - just the key words that seem to be turning up in all the spam bot posts, but I'll tweak this as and when things change - that way, we're not being too draconian with our rules, so pretty much all normal comments will still work, but my new best mate the Russian Spam-Bot (TM?) won't be able to tell us all what a wonderful website it's got to tell us about.

Anyway, if you're trying to post a comment on UPSU and come up against problems, please let me know here and I'll take a look into it. Promise :)

Right, I'm off to watch Hell's Kitchen USA (yup, it's a quiet night in... How sad...) and try and figure out how the hell I'm going to put my 120Gb hard disk in my MacBook Pro without deleting all my docs... It's going to be a late night.

Have a good weekend and wrap up warm, kids ;o) /al

Well, it's been a couple of very long days. I've been tied up with the forums, blogs and commenting system. The forums and blogs have been seeing more pixel-pushing and a lot of sub-standard code has been re-written to improve the reliability of both systems.

The main bulk of today's work was getting the commenting system ready to turn on. The basics were already in place - people could write a comment and click a button, and an administrator could then decide whether they wanted it displayed or not.

However, a fundamental part of the blogs system is that the owner of a blog... sorry, diary entry should also be able to manage their comments. This means that, when someone comments on a news story or diary entry, the author of the item gets an e-mail telling them, and they can then go and see the comment. Not only that, but they can approve the comment, edit it, or delete it.

Another important part of this system is the ability for anybody to make a complaint about a comment - it's an unfortunate fact of life that websites tend to attract the bad with the good, and because it's impossible to guarantee that no comments which breach site policy will slip through the safety nets we have in place, there's a mechanism in place which allows anybody to report a comment to a member of the site administration team. This system has been written to cover anything on the site, so you can now also complain about forum posts if you wish to.

The last stages of testing the commenting system will be taking place over the next few days, and I'm hoping to have it ready to launch by Monday, along with the diaries. This year's election candidates are going to be my first guinea pigs in the system, and I'm hoping this proves to be a valuable help to their campaigns. That said, it might turn out that no-one wants to make use of t'Interwebnet to promote themselves. Only time - and some gentle prodding - will tell.

Other happenings lately - or not, in a couple of cases - are the re-vamp and mahoosive update of the Social:Life section I've been asked to tackle. It's a shame it's taken a bit longer than I'd hoped to get the information out there, but this update will hopefully set the trading side of things up more-or-less until the end of the year, which is handy. No word on the Grad Ball yet, but I'll be sure to relay that here once I know some more.

The RAG website is still not up - entirely my fault (and I hang my head in shame). All the graphics are more-or-less done; I just have to slice and dice them, and squeeze them into a new template. A couple of things are bugging me at the moment about the colours; I want to stay true to the black/orange of the RAG publicity, but there's nothing quite like trying to read light text on a black background to put anyone off. Ideas on a postcard as to how I can tackle this - the writer of the best suggestion gets to buy me a pint (that's fair, isn't it...?).

The Course Reps mini-site is also on the to-do list and I fear I'm going to have to let it slip past the March 1st deadline. Luckily, I'm still waiting on the text - without that, it's a bit hard to know how to divide it all up, but the layout and colours I've yet to decide on, so myself, a pack of felt-tip pens (and maybe some playdough...) and a camera will be off on a mission to find some inspiration tomorrow. Just how inspiring the Uni halls of residence are though - at least when sober - is another matter entirely...

We're also starting to get on our feet with the mass-mailing system (although some of you may have missed out on last week's JobShop e-mails - this mistake will be rectified this week, and I apologise!) and should be sending out some reasonably uniform-looking, easy to read mails from the various departments on a more regul...

While I was pushing pixels around the forums yesterday, I remembered something a friend had mentioned about the way the authentication system on UPSU.net works. More out of luck than judgement I checked the code for the commenting system and, sure enough, the code that was needed to allow comments to be posted by non-Administrators was missing.

One simple code change later and the commenting system is now working (I think... touch wood...). This is great timing for us - the elections are looming and I want to get the candidates keeping a blog of their campaigning activities. While there's nothing stopping this at the moment, it's also important that the electorate can comment and ask questions of the candidates. No commenting system just means that the candidates have a one-way sounding-off platform, which no-one is going to be interested in.

There are a few final things I need to do with the layout of the commenting system before I'm happy with turning it on; these are all layout adjustments though, rather than any changes to the underlying structure. Basically, I just want to provide a box for people to provide their name, their course/job (optional), a contact e-mail address (for our reference, and again optional), and their comment. We shouldn't make it any harder than that to comment on something you read on the site, and - as with the forums - the "simple is definitely better" mantra seems to be the way forward.

By the way, UPSU.net had 1.2 million hits yesterday. That's (almost) a record for us, and I think the site will start seeing more traffic as the semester 1 exams get out of the way and people can start taking a bit more interest in what's going on at their Union.

Tomorrow night is the first of our film nights, and we're showing Shaun of The Dead. Entry - and popcorn - are both free, and with our £45k sound system, I reckon we're going to have quite a good night of it.

Interestingly, ISO have just announced that they're relaxing the restrictions on accessing the wireless network; while you still need to have a valid Netware login, you no longer need to apply for access, and if you change your laptop, you don't need to re-apply. ISO's mobile computing website doesn't look like it's been updated yet, but they say they will be providing the latest information soon, so keep an eye on it to find out what's changed if you're a FreedomNet user.

Right, I'm off to work on the commenting code, blogs and RAG website. I'll report back with more terminally dull "news" as it happens - don't touch that button...

I'm still having problems working out why only admins can post comments. It also seems that the person who wrote the commenting system (which is part of an open source project) is stumped by this problem.

The comments system is a very important one in my eyes because it means everyone can voice their opinion on a subject on the same page, instead of talking about it in the forums (although there's a good argument that drawing people into the forums isn't such a bad thing, either).

Mind you, I *think* I've just found out what might be wrong here, so I'm off to try a few things over a cup of tea... Update: didn't work - bugger!