Posts tagged with: site-updates

I am trying out a method to reduce bot attempts on forms like on my contact page based on fluffy’s example.

On select pages, I now check for a specific cookie. If it is not found or is more than 24 hours old, then the browser redirects to the “Sentience Check” page. That page is a minimal form with a button to indicate “Yes, I am a hooman.” Submitting the form sets the expected cookie and redirects back to the original page. If Javascript is enabled, it will submit the form as soon as the page loads, so most hooman visitors will only see the intermediate page for a second and should be able to continue without issues.

Also at fluffy’s suggestion, the sentience check page returns a response code of 429: Too Many Requests with a header that indicates: retry after one hour. I have no high expectation of the bots respecting that, but maybe the lack of successful response codes will cause some to back off.

The last thing I did was add a noindex meta tag on the page, so search engines should ignore it.

If you’d like to view the page, I recommend turning Javascript off temporarily and then visiting: gregorlove.com/sentience-check/.

I am interested to see how much this will reduce bot attempts on the contact and public sign-in pages. I have had CSRF and honeypot form field protections on both for quite a while, but of course I still see a lot of attempts on them.

Depending how this goes, I might expand its usage to the “send a webmention” form and explore using it to block LLM bots.

I did consider using “I am a meat popsicle” on the button, but not everyone might get The Fifth Element reference.

I added a banner to go along with my Long Covid Awareness Day post.

“International Long Covid Awareness Color Codes: Teal: #18929A, Grey: #939393, and Black: #000000”

https://www.longcovidawareness.life/graphics

Aside: I quite like this teal color. I might have to work that into my site in some places in the longer term.

Previously, Previously

I added a candy cane banner to my site for the month of December.

Previously

For today’s IndieWeb Create Day, I finally updated the layout on my article permalinks. Several years ago, I started updating non-homepage pages to use a streamlined template with a smaller header logo and navigation links beside it. I kept putting off the article permalinks because a lot of messy, custom code piled up in it over the years. The end visual result is not a huge difference, but it will make maintenance a lot easier going forward.

I improved some of the layout in the article footer while I was at it. I moved my author card to the very bottom of the page, instead of putting it between the article footer and responses. That let me remove the links to jump to the response, which was kind of a weird experience before. I also set the metadata (published date, tags, syndication links) to be right-aligned, matching the layout on the rest of my posts.

Here is what it looks like now:

Contrasted with how it looked before:

I made a small update on my homepage. The photos section (screenshot below) previously was not showing some of the meta information like the syndication links. I added those along with the rest of the h-entry markup so that Bridgy will find the syndication links and send back responses from Bluesky.

I gave Bridgy a nudge to scrape my homepage again and it quickly started sending the responses back to the original post. This IndieWeb stuff really seems like magic, sometimes!

I updated my site to use the Libravatar CDN for avatars. If one isn't found, it will still fallback to Gravatar, so it should be seamless for commenters. I also updated the default icon to identicons, so people without avatars will get a nifty geometric image instead of the anonymous silhouette.

My privacy policy is updated with this information too.