Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: spam

Fighting spam

September 20, 2014 / / 11 Comments

In an attempt to fight the ever-growing amounts of spam on this blog (nearly hundred a week that I have to manually delete), I have made a change to the comments section.

I already have a conditional CAPTCHA appearing if a comment seems to be a spam message, and Akismet is checking my posts against their spam database, but the spam texts are increasingly “well-written” so that they are harder to distinguish from bona-fide comments. The actual spam URL is mostly no longer in the text body but in the commenter’s address field.

As of now, everyone who does not yet have an approved comment on one of my articles will end up in the moderation queue where I have to approve or reject the comment manually.

That will stop the spam messages from appearing on the blog and RSS feed, and once you have an approved post on my blog, your next posts will not have to be moderated.

My apologies if you want to comment here for the first time and your text does not appear immediately after hitting “Submit”. I think this is the best for the blog as well as its readers!

Eric

Covert spam

August 7, 2009 / / 2 Comments

I run this blog without the illusion that it will make me any money. But I know there are many people trying to make a good amount of cash by maintaining a “popular” blog. What defines popular? Having a lot of “backlinks” i.e. other sites refferring to (linking to) your blog is a measure of how popular you are. Being popular creates income – a small percentage of visitors are likely to click through on advertisements on your site. The more visitors you get, the bigger the cash flow.

It seems that it is becoming more fashionable for other bloggers to actively work on increasing their own blog’s  popularity. How they do that? Simple: by visiting other blogs and leaving a comment there which contains a link to their own blog… thus creating these highly desired backlinks themselves.

I have found several of these comments on my own blog, and I will delete such postings if if I think they were only added here to generate income for that other web site. I hate doing this, but hey, come on!

Eric

My dokuwiki got an update

September 25, 2008 / / 0 Comments

Today, I updated the Dokuwiki software that I use for my Wiki to the latest version, and installed a new version of the Monobook template as well. Also, no thanks to the spambots that were messing up the Wiki’s discussion pages, I installed a “captcha” plugin. You are now required to enter a few “hard to read characters” before you are allowed to edit any page. If the characters are indeed hard to read, you can playback an audio version (a voice reads the characters out loud one by one).

I believe that the upgrade worked well, but if any of you find something weird on the pages that you think should not be there, please drop me an email or reply to this post, and I will fix it.

Eric

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