Public Class GeoffAppleby

.Text Playing

In the last week I’ve spent a bit of time playing with .Text (the current version as it exists on CodeBetter – 0.95).

There’s a few things I’ve been looking into, mostly just to do with display of different things. As most of you will know, we’ve been working on getting a nice main feed page. I’m still not happy with it, but I think that that’s more of a programmer thing – I’ve just go to tweak and tweak and tweak :)

We've also been looking into what to do about link blogs. So far Brendan has created a linkblog for us all to use, but we want to keep it away from the main feed, so I did a bit of checking into how to create two main home pages, and two main feeds, so we can have a 'linkblog site' and 'normal site' all in the one site. It'll end up being pretty easy.

Comment spam is another thing we need to deal with. So far (touch wood) we've been comment spam free here, but when it bites us, it'll bite hard I'm sure. We've been having some discussions about what methods we should employ to protect us from that too. There's three main things we can do. a) Comment moderation; b) A CAPTCHA control; and c) a SQL trigger.

Comment moderation sucks, in that it still takes time out of our day to enable the comments that we want to keep (which should be most of them). CAPTCHA controls suck, because it's so easy to get it wrong (and they've been cracked now anyway).

Triggers are the most interesting. I've found a few resources that have talked about this - the best being one that scans comments for blacklisted words and blocks them if they hit. It includes allowing white-listed words through, and even falling through to the vbscript regex library.

And now I've hit a show stopper. There's no point in further development for a while! :)

Since Community Server has finally been released (no, I'm not linking to any blog posts about it being released, since every man and his dog already have :) I see no point in doing any code work for the moment - instead, I'm currently evaluating Community Server, and any changes that I want to make I'll make to this, and CodeBetter can get itself an upgrade!

To do that, however, we've got to wait for the source code to be released. Hopefully this will be soon. It's my hope that we can get CodeBetter upgraded and running better than ever. The interesting part is that now we get forums out of the box too - hopefully we can generate some interest and get a nice interactive community happening. Anyone got any suggestions for what they might want from CodeBetter forums?

So watch this space. Hopefully over the next few weeks you'll be seeing a lot of changes - for the better is our hope. Feedback is always important. There's many ways you can make suggestions to us - comments on blog posts, pick a random contact link from any of the CodeBetter bloggers, specifically answering questions to what Raymond asked...it's all easy :)