I've been hard at work improving the blogging engine that is used here at BarnyardBBS.  I've improved the search feature, and added the ability for people to comment.

Thus far, I'd never implemented commenting.  I had always been reluctant due to the possibility of abuse and spam.  After frequently reading Skye's Blog, I thought it was time to open up a bit.

The new commenting system is integrated into the existing blog.  In the bottom corner of each post, you will see the number of comments posted (click the link to read and post your own).

I decided that I don't like CAPTCHA images.  They're annoying.  They also aren't very accessible to anyone with even a slight vision problem.  However, spam cannot be ignored.  I built a simple math problem into the posting process to quell spambots.  The problems rotate frequently, just in case.

Also, I debated allowing HTML comments; but ultimately decided against it.  I try to keep my blog as pure and formattable content. Allowing markup in the comments would stray from that goal.  It's also much easier to simply strip all HTML from the code, rather than risk tricky exploits (and spam links).

I made them very easy. If the math problems are too hard for anybody to solve; I probably don't care about their thoughts anyway.

Time to see what happens.  For the moment, consider the blogging engine unstable, as I've written a lot of code in a short amount of time.

For the first time in BarnyardBBS history; let me know what you think (link in the bottom right corner of this post).