Category Archives: Blogging

Winning The Fight Against Spam

Blogging, Software

I hate spam, I hate it in email, I hate it in paper mail, I hate it in instant messaging, I hate it in forums – I just hate it.

For a long time, I have struggled with comment spam on this site up until I installed Akismet, which has been my knight in shining armour to help combat comment spam.

Over the last year, the rate that this site has been getting spammed has increased every single month, without fail – relentlessly. The spam statistics for the Akismet service indicates that the rate they are receiving and filtering spam has also been increasing.

At the moment, the graph doesn’t show any particular sign that the rate of spam has slowed at all. For some reason though, the rate that this site is receiving spam has definitely decreased. Over the last few months, I would delete between 350 and some times over 1000 per day while at the moment it is averaging a number less than 200.

That got me wondering what has changed around these parts, nothing in particular. I’m still running the same blogging software, still using Akismet to filter spam on the site and the search engine rankings of the site haven’t decreased such that it might make it a less likely target for spammers.

Is it possible that enough people are combating spam efficiently these days that at least some portion of the spamming community have called it quits? I don’t know if there is a way for anyone to answer that question with any sort of certainty however I can only hope that it might be the case.

Die filthy spammers, die.

WordPress Founder Has A Dig At Competitors

Blogging, Software

Recently Matt Mullenweg was interviewed by Adriaan Pienaar about all things WordPress. Adriaan asks a good question about Movable Type:

And the second part of the question is, considering Movable Type (probably your main competitor for WordPress.org) has been commercial for so long now, is the fact that WP is Open-Source a competitive advantage?

and Matt responds, whilst slipping in a quick left jab:

Movable Type has been available cheaply or for free for a long time, and they recently announced that they’re going to open source it, but I think people will still continue to choose WordPress because it’s not about price, it’s about quality.

You’ve just got to love it.

Splogs, Splogs & More Splogs

Blogging, Websites

Everyone wants to make a quick buck online, unfortunately the trend at the moment seems to revolve around not doing any work to actually make the dollars. If email spam wasn’t enough, now dirty dirty spammers have taken to producing splogs, or spam blogs.

The basic idea behind a splog is to generate lots and lots of content, throw on some sort of advertising – maybe Google Adsense and hopefully watch the money come in. Of course, since spammers are bottom feeding filth, it is far too much effort for them to produce the content they want to whore for a dollar themselves. The clear and obvious solution is to rip off other internet users content and republish it as their own, simply to produce content on their site and an opportunity for someone to click a piece of advertising.

My problem with splogs, is that the owners are aggregating and/or republishing other peoples work to make money for nothing. Reporting on the happenings online and around the world is fine, if you’re adding your own point of view and it’s in your own words; ripping someone else’s work is just plain rude.

Typically, if someones content is being republished without notification/permission and it’s attributed properly – most content authors don’t have a problem with it. Since sploggers are bottom feeders, not only do they not ask permission – they generally don’t provide a link back to the original content. It isn’t fair to tar all bottom feeding sploggers with the same brush, some do take the time to attribute the content, which is less of a slap in the face.

Personally, I’d prefer it if they’d write their own unique content; however in the absence of that I guess for the moment we’ll have to graciously accept the odd inbound link from the ‘nice’ spammers.

Getting Your CSS Off

Blogging, Programming, Websites

Toward the end of March 2006, Dustin Diaz thought that stripping all of the presentation from his web site was an excellent way of promoting web standards and CSS based design. The idea caught on and a whole swag of people participated in the first CSS Naked Day on April 5th 2006.

A year has passed and once more, web standards advocates alike around the world are stripping all of the presentation from their sites by running around butt naked without any cascading style sheets to hide their wobbly bits!

I thought about participating in the naked day this year, however I pretty much participate in it all year around so I didn’t think it would have had that much effort. If I had a graphic design bone in my body, I could have created the anti-naked day by getting my CSS on and releasing an amazing visual feast for everyone.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a visual feast for you this year – in the mean time, you should check out some cute cat photos!

Akismet, Stopping Website Comment Spam The Easy Way

Blogging, Software

Akismet web site spam filtering has blocked 100,021 spam messagesBy now, everyone should be acutely aware that I hate spam. In fact, I hate it that much that I think I’ve written about it every couple of months:

This time around it is no different, as Akismet just keeps on keeping on. I first installed Akismet toward the start of August 2006 as I was being overwhelmed by the volume of comment spam I was receiving. Initially, it was just one or two website spam messages but it soon increased at a rapid pace. I was receiving so much comment spam, I just couldn’t handle it manually anymore and I needed a way of stopping the spam for good.

After looking around at various WordPress comment spam filtering solutions, such as Bad Behaviour and Spam Karma; I ended up deciding on Akismet. There were a couple of reasons that I felt that Akismet was going to perform a better job stopping website spam, the main one being it was driven by the community. Spammers just love to prey on the masses and there sure is a mass of blogs on the internet. If the blogging community backed Akismet, then it seemed reasonable that as soon as enough bloggers flagged something as being spam – I wouldn’t have to worry about it either. As it turns out, this is absolutely the case as very few comment spam messages actually get through the Akismet filtering. I hate web site spam so much that I have comment moderation on as well; I know it might frustrate some commentors but I would prefer to vet a valid comment than see spam land on my site.

Akismet has now been protecting this site from website comment spam for approximately nine months and in that time it has successfully axed about 100,000 spam messages from ever appearing on the site. I can only imagine how hard it must be for people running web sites or forums these days that don’t have easy plugin access to a service like Akismet to stop website spam.

Pretty significant milestone I thought, go Akismet go!