What am I thinking right now? Right at this very exact instance?
Well, honestly, I’m looking up at the SSH session I have connected to my Linux firewall, wondering when my brother is going to 1) Realize I’ve blocked his P2P traffic, 2) Close Kazaa or whatever he has running, and 3) Stop effectively DoSing hte internal interface of my gateway…
Hey, you asked what I was thinking. Don’t blame me for answering, man…
Alright, I finally decided to stop being such a lazy bum and update my Permalink structure in WordPress.
When I first started using WordPress for this blog, I didn’t realize that there was such an option, and by the time I had, I was afraid I’d break too many links if I changed it after the fact. Welp, even though it’s probably going to cause a bunch of unusual Trackback / pingback side effects (and more now than it would have then), I’ve gone ahead and done it.
Everything new will be in the format /year/month/day/post-name, just like virtually every other blog you find out there. Thanks to the designers of WordPress forseeing this contingency, all the old ?p=### links will still work just fine. Kudos to the WP devs!
I guess I’ve been more than a tad lazy lately, and I haven’t been blogging nearly as much as I should have or would have liked to. My boss has been off for a week (we’re in week 2 now), and so I’ve been taking it easy all around.
Fortunately, that means I’ve gotten a good bit of coding done. I plan to launch 2 new sites sometime in the next few weeks. One will be a new Dacnomm.COM site, since the existing one really pretty much sucked. I’m trying to unify all the sites I run / manage / host so that they’re all more easily accessible from each other, basically just to help spread some traffic goodness around.
The other site I’m not going to talk about right now. It’s just a small site that I’ve been hosting for about a year now. Their PHPNuke installation was so many versions out of date I finally decided it was time for an update. I really hate PHPNuke and PostNuke these days, and their purposes are really more suited to a blog-type site. Cue WordPress! I’m trying to learn my way around a WordPress install a little better, mainly just well enough to get a new template designed. Hopefully before I’m done, there’ll also be a few nice features that I think could use adding.
Anyway, that’s about it for me… Back to my Fedora install!
OK, ok, I didn’t mean lovers like THAT… You bunch of sick freaks! You know, our insurance won’t pay for that…
Anyway… Who really doesn’t love a cute cow? I mean, honestly… Man’s best friend is the dog, but how many times have you been scared of a big fierce dog barring his teeth at you? And when was the last time a fuzzy cow stopped grazing long enough to threaten you with bodily harm? That’s what I thought…
If only we could get indoor cows… That’s really the only thing keeping them from becoming mainstream pets: the need for all that land and grazing room. What if we got sod carpets?
Oh sure, you think I’m crazy now… Just wait. One day, the empire of the cow shall come, and you’ll all be praising my prophetic words…
Email Harvesting and SPAM
Welp, while Bill deals with his blog SPAM across town, I’m dealing with plain old email SPAM instead.
Looks like someone’s decided to go through and harvest email addresses from one of my websites. After being virus laden email free for countless months, last night I received at least 6 different W32.Mytob.DF@mm virii at my chris@doesnthaveone.com address. I think one of the only places I use that address is on this blog… I’m not sure if I should feel honored that they snagged it or not.
Bill also linked to another post about a Coding-related Wiki getting taken down for approximately an hour so the database could be scrubbed of all SPAM. The author is asking for any advice you may have.
I’m too busy to delve too deeply into the matter, but I wonder what lengths he’s taken thus far. There are several different approaches he could take. The easiest to implement that would also require the least maintenance would be a simple registration system. If just a basic registration system doesn’t work, how about one of those god awful “type what you see in this image” things? Those are designed to prevent SPAM, right?
Several of the Blog software vendors have also added the ability to require approval for a user the first time they try to post. Seems like a tad bit more work than the previous suggestion, but it should also help cut down on SPAM nearly 100%. I imagine most of the casual SPAMers aren’t going to register, then post a legitimate comment, and THEN start randomly spamming your site.
Other more difficult ideas would be to implement a total moderation policy. Perhaps a community-driven moderation system would help to eliminate some overhead for the administrator or moderator(s). You could also create a simple IP-blacklist utility with varying degrees of severity. You could totally block them from your site using something as simple as an Apache module (but I think this guy is a Windows coder, so he’s probably running IIS), or code it into your pages. Let a known spammer only view content, not author any changes. Knock out a couple dozen IPs and you’ll probably kill off a lot of the SPAM.
I know my blog isn’t nearly as popular as many of the others I read, but I just don’t see that SPAM is that big a deal these days. There are so many options out there for a web-based project to utilize to combat SPAM that it seems almost pointless to give up on it these days. Sure, some of them require a little more effort on your part than others, but particularly for a community-based Wiki, you should be able to get help in moderation from some of your more loyal users in managing the system.
Bottom line: if you love something enough, you’ll be willing to put a little extra effort into it to implement a SPAM-fighting system.
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