Comments re-enabled

by Dave Rapp on January 18, 2012 at 4:19 am
Posted In: Blog Posts

After applying a generous helping of IP blacklisting, I found that the spam had slowed to a crawl. The site is getting, like, one per day so far, and that’s easily slow enough for me to keep the comments in manually approve/disapprove mode. So commenting on all posts has been re-enabled.

I’d like to share one of the spam posts though, because I find it so out of context that it’s sort of funny. Here goes.

um actually, I’m adopted. my mother was a pregnant teen and adopted me out to an American family. granted, I don’t particularly like America, but there’s no way she would have known that then. she cared about me enough to let another family raise me and try to give me everything. that’s rude to say parents who give children away don’t care. some definitely do. I probably wouldn’t have grown up to be an engineer if I had stayed in that life, and I really appreciate her giving me the chance to be.

This was to be posted on strip #200 and had a link to some sex webcam site. Exactly what a spam post like this is meant to accomplish is still something that perplexes me.

One other thing. I wrote a review for a set from that stupid LEGO Friends line. I may be considered just the tiniest bit NSFW in your boss is a 60-year-old tightass suffering from a serious case of malignant intelligence-cancer. But you can read it here. I’m going to make a page for reviews for things and tutorials for stuff, but right now I’m still going through the archives.

4 Comments

Phase Two: 7.9% complete (also spam)

by Dave Rapp on January 10, 2012 at 6:01 am
Posted In: Uncategorized

I got a little side tracked, but the process of combing through the archives, fixing things, creating thumbnails, and adding notes and commentary is coming along nicely, if a bit slowly.

Unfortunately, some robot out there decided that it likes my website and won’t leave me alone. Started a little after midnight, random pages in the archives started recieving a huge influx of comment spam. All of it is generic crap like “An answer from an eexprt! Thanks for contributing.” and I can’t even figure out what the spambot’s goal is. Also, every comment has one intentional typo in one word, presumably to throw off automated spam filters. Lucky for us, my site doesn’t have an automated spam filter, it has a manual one. Any time someone tries to post a comment on any post, their comment automatically gets witheld and doesn’t post until an admin (me) approves it manually, unless the poster has had a comment approved previously. Which means none of you should see one single spam post. But the moderation queue is still getting full fast enough to annoy the crap out of me, so for the moment I’ve disabled commenting on any posts more than two weeks old.

I’m thinking over the various way to get around this. Adding a captcha that needs to be filled out in order to post a comment might do the trick, but I really don’t want to have to do that. For the moment I’m just blacklisting the spambot’s IP addresses and hoping for the best, but I’m hoping for a third option. Commenting is still enabled on this post, so if any of ya’ll have a suggestion to deal with this nuisance, I’d love to hear it.

And once again, thank you all for your continued patience as I pull this site together.

8 Comments

Phase One: Complete

by Dave Rapp on January 1, 2012 at 5:15 am
Posted In: Blog Posts

As I type this, the long process of renaming all the comics in my archive to be compatible with Comicpress’ system is complete, and everything has been uploaded. The entire archive for Brick Earth Saga (up to this point) is available for browsing.

Unfortunately this was the easy part. Now I have to go through every page, one at a time, and check for errors. I’ll also be adding commentary as I go, wherever I see something I feel like commenting on. Which, knowing me, is going to be all over the place. I also need to go through the plethora of settings and styling options at my disposal to make this website not look like a generic gray and silver piece of crap, plus add a banner/logo/whatever, some pages for the Extras section and the old bios page, as well as stick the BCN dropdown somewhere. I’m also considering getting some wordpress ads set up, and I need to get my sitemeter tracker back up and running.

All of this is phase two. It’ll take a while. Once it’s done, or at least close enough to being done that the website is fully functional in the way that I want it to be, normal comicing will resume, and we’ll finally continue where I left off back in September. I know it’s been a long wait. I humbly request that you, noble reader, wait just a little bit longer, as I put my act back together.

Thank you all very much for your patience and support.

Oh and the comments are working, so feel free to leave one. If you don’t want to do that you can email me. I promise I read everything and I respond as best I can.

9 Comments

What happened to Brickworld

by Dave Rapp on December 23, 2011 at 5:19 am
Posted In: Blog Posts

Okay, you’re probably looking at the site and thinking, “What the fuck happened here?” And also, “Why did the name of the comic change?” And possibly even “Where the hell have you been for the past several months, Dave?”

Question the first – it’s being rebuilt! Which is why, at the moment, everything looks like crap and is slightly broken. I am installing and configuring WordPress and ComicPress so that the comic’s updating can be fully automated and so that I can actually build up a buffer like everyone says you’re supposed to. Also, there’s going to be an RSS feed because I got some feedback from reliable sources that basically said, “Your comic is incredible! I wish I could read it! But you don’t have an RSS feed so I kind of don’t give a crap.” I’m trying to rectify that situation.

Question the second – when I named my comic I was unaware of the existence of the yearly LEGO convention called Brickworld, and was also not aware that any other brick comics existed out in the world wide web, apart from Legostar Galactica and Irregular Webcomic. I have since discovered that there’s actually a bunch of us (and I also helped make it possible for there to be a whole bunch more!) and at least one other comic out there was using the name “Brickworld” before me.

Additionally, this comic doesn’t actually take place on Brickworld, it takes place on Brick Earth. So when I see someone summarize my comic beginning with a phrase like, “Brickworld Saga is a webcomic taking place in the fictional land of Brickworld…” I get a little peeved. So I figure, why not change the name of the comic to reflect the name of the planet? Thus, Brickworld Saga is now Brick Earth saga. BAM.

Question the third – I don’t particularly want to get into the gritty details, and I don’t know how many of you honestly care to read them anyway. But I was depressed and lacking motivation and basically just couldn’t drag myself over to the camera to make strips anymore. The thought of actually QUITTING the comic barely crossed my mind, but the thought of actually updating like normal was inconceivable as well. But I’m better now. And once the site is put back together, updates will resume. I’m trying to get it all done before 2012 starts, but I shouldn’t make any promises.

Stay tuned. The phoenix is rising from the ashes.

P.S. There’s a discussion topic for this over on the BCN. Alternately, feel free to post a comment here. There’s something wrong with the comments function, so if that doesn’t work you can always just email me.

8 Comments