CTO

There are times when I truly wonder whether our CTO (Chief Technical Officer) really has any clue at all when it comes to websites and the like.

The company currently runs about 30 websites, one of which has a large forum for users of the software to comment on it, make suggestions, bug reports and the like. That’s fine, even when it’s run within the sack-of-festering-shite known as Mambo. However, he insists that it’s also left wide open, so that people can write a post on it without registering themselves on the site. Naturally this has come to the attention of a bundle of scumbag spammers, who are currently blasting the thing into oblivion. (About 15,000 posts today so far) Oh dear.

Now, because the CTO is a knob slightly under-represented on the IQ front, he still wants the forum to be left open, rather than insisting that people register before posting. He feels that registration will mean people don’t make comments, and would apparently rather leave the site open to spam-scum. Seems bizarre to me, and I’ve said so in no uncertain terms. But he’s still insistent on this policy, although he has then said “But I want you to bar the IP addresses that the spammers are using, and block their accounts” It doesn’t seem to have sunk in yet that they don’t have fucking accounts, they’re logged in as “Guest”. Gah.

It makes life interesting, to say the least.

Other than that, the current stuff I’m working on involves user registration, which he’s fine with in this case because it’s fundamental to how the site works. (There’s a logic there somewhere, fighting to get out and be understood.) However, he’s also heard the expression “single sign-on” somewhere, and so wants me to check my users when they log-in/register against the user tables of four other websites in order to make sure that if they’re already registered on those, they can use the new one without any problem.

I’m now on the fifth re-write of the log-in/registration script, as the goalposts change. Which, again, makes life interesting…