"Kipple
is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match
or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple
reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your
apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It
always gets more and more"
The
internet is the greatest modern kipple agent. When nobody is around, junk
reproduces itself in comment posts or indeed any unprotected form on your site.
I had not checked the site for a month or so, and when I finally did, the
comment sections were full of url's for everything from viagra to penis
enlargement to "meet hot women". So I had to install the contemporary equivalent
of a Voight-Kampf test - a program that can distinguish between a bot and a
human.
I found this great script called
reCAPTCHA which was really
easy to integrate into the site code, so now every time you write a comment -
you have to type in 2 words presented to you in a distorted image. It's a little
annoying, but the cool thing is that they are using words that people type to
digitize books. That alone made me overlook the relative ugliness of the form
they provide.
By the
way, I can't believe that kipple is not in my computer's spelling dictionary.
It's one of the coolest concepts, introduced in Phillip K. Dicks story "Do
Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" (that's where the quote is from).