the_new_captcha raze in case you were wondering what's up with the captcha today: a long time ago, when blather was just about as busy as it ever got, we started getting some annoying spam on both blue and red from a bot that had a strange obsession with viagra and cialis. i guess even bots have issues in the bedroom sometimes. i'd recommend trying out some role-play instead of channelling sexual frustration into spam. but that's easy for me to say, being human and all. when the spam really got out of hand, user_24 got in touch with dallas to see what could be done. the captcha was introduced as a way of weeding out the non-humans, killing the spam without doing anything to change the fundamental nature of blather. in mid-january of this year, some spam started showing up again on blue out of nowhere. instead of filling up existing blathes with unending grotesqueries of text, this bot or person was starting new blathes. they were only about one line long apiece, but they became a daily thing, funnelled through a rotating list of names and fake email addresses. the titles of the blathes were all four characters long, and the mix of letters and numbers made it pretty clear that each title was whatever the captcha had given them on that day. either a bot managed to crack the captcha, or a person born without creativity decided filling up a low-traffic website with cialis spam was somehow a worthwhile use of their time. the spam tapered off for a week or two at the end of march. then it kicked back up again with a vengeance in april. since user_24 isn't around blather much anymore, i thought i'd shoot dallas an email to see if there was any way to stop it this time. he removed well over a hundred spam blathes (splathes? blams?) and blocked the two russian IP addresses responsible for creating all the content. that worked for a week or two, until the person/thing respawned and got back down to business. for whatever reason, they never migrated over here. they only targeted blue. dallas said the number of IPs they were using had increased. he blocked the new ones and altered the captcha to make it a little longer and harder to bypass, and the land was free of spam once more. so that's the scoop. hopefully no one objects to the change, and hopefully it'll lead to even more moments of accidental hilarity now that the captcha can talk to us with a few more characters in its arsenal. an immense amount of gratitude goes out to dallas for not just keeping blather running, but for taking time out to resolve issues like this and that whole blather_don't_be_slow thing a while back. i think a lot of people in his position would probably look at how few of us are left on blue and red and think, "why bother?" there aren't words good enough to get across what this place has meant to so many of us, what it still means, and what it's given to us by allowing us to give ourselves to it. so i'll just say thank you and hope that's enough. 170511 ... unhinged what is it with russian hackers? they spam Blather with cialis ads and then try to scam me into some phoney music promotion site with a track i wrote ten years ago with someone that lives in a different country now. although i have to say their supposed involvement in our 2016 election is hilarious to me 170511 ... raze i did some research to try and answer the question of "why russia?", but all i really came away with was the impression that for some reason there are a lot of people in that country who see some value in building themselves into evil spam kingpins. one guy who was notorious for his spamming efforts actually had his death celebrated by the media when he was murdered by a few women who were trying to rob him and didn't know anything about the spam business he had going. you can't even make up a story like that. 170512 ... raze looks like it cracked the new captcha too now. don't people/bots have better things to do with their time? 170512 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Six characters! Testing, testing. 170513 ... jane i wanted to see what it looked like and also thank you, sir, for reaching out to dallas. cheers, lil red. 170515 ... raze i wish i could say my efforts were rewarded by the death of blather spam as we know it, but it seems all we've got is a longer captcha. though the last few days have been spam-free on blue. either dallas snuck in and short-circuited the new pathways the bot built, or the bland spam machine is taking a breather. either way, here's hoping it sticks ... 170515 ... leif I've never thought about what life would be like if blather ceased to exist when I type it into my browser. I would be inconsolably devastated. I've given 13 years of my life to these pages--it's where I look to find myself and to remember who I've been. Thank you isn't enough. 170516 ... Risen I would hate to see blather go. I got paranoid and downloaded the source code a while ago, just in case... because I think I would have to try to resurrect it if it ever did go! Is there a way we can maybe help crowdfund the server time/space? 170601 ... raze i kind of inquired about that a year or three ago (and might have downloaded the source code too, for the same reason!). from my interactions with dallas, i get the feeling that though we might not see him on blather anymore, he cares very much about its ongoing existence, and our collective legacy of words should be here for as long as the internet exists. we couldn't ask for a better custodian to this bottomless, still-evolving thing we've all helped to shape. 170601 what's it to you? who go blather from