Tag Archives: Spam

Awesome spam filtering for WordPress

By Dougal | Published: January 14, 2009

I’ve always felt that Akismet does a pretty good job of filtering out spam. After all, since I started using it, Akismet has caught around 500,000 spam comments for me. But a few months ago, I decided to try out a different anti-spam plugin that caught my eye. . [...]

Posted in WordPress | Also tagged Akismet, antispam anti-spam, blacklist, comments, Email, harvesters, httpbl, project honeypot, spammers, WordPress, wordpresswednesday | 20 Comments

Whither Spam?

By Dougal | Published: June 14, 2008

When I switched to my new Slicehost server, I spent a while trying to decide what I wanted to do about email for my domains. I contemplated using Google’s domain email service, or some other third-party email hosting. But I just hated giving up that much control of my email setup. [...]

Posted in Hardware, Linux, Servers, Services, Software, Spam, Tech | Also tagged antivirus, clamav, Email, email spam, fighting spam, Linux, mail, mailscanner, mailwatch, Servers, slicehost, smtp, spamassassin, spamsnake, Ubuntu | 4 Comments

Upgrade or else!

By Dougal | Published: April 8, 2008

UPDATE 2008-04-16: Well crud. I was just re-reading the WP 2.5 announcement post for something else, and spotted a bit about security updates between 2.3.3 and 2.5. So my previous advice about 2.3.3 being okay was incorrect. This is one of the areas where I disagree with the core developement team — if it was up to me, there would be a 2.3.4 security release for those who have good reasons why they can’t upgrade to 2.5 right now.

Okay, people, if you are running any version of WordPress older than ~~2.3.3~~ 2.5*, you need to upgrade now. [...]

Posted in Blogs, Search, Security, WordPress | Also tagged payattention, Plugins, Search, Security, Technorati, Themes, upgrade, Upgrades, WordPress | 91 Comments

glTail: Realtime Logfile Visualization

By Dougal | Published: October 11, 2007

This screenshot shows how glTail visualizes a comment spam attack in my configuration.

A few days ago, in my usual daily link browsing, I ran across a link to something called “glTail“, which was described as “realtime logfile visualization”. I’m often keeping an eye on my server logs to catch unusual activity, so I thought I’d give it it a look. [...]

Posted in Applications, Open Source, Ruby, Servers, WordPress | Also tagged Apache, Graphics, logs, monitoring, Ruby, Servers, sysadmin, tools, visualization, WordPress | 4 Comments

My Favorite WordPress Plugins

By Dougal | Published: March 13, 2007

One of the coolest things about WordPress is the powerful Plugin API which allows us to create add-ons which can radically extend the basic functions of our sites. Most plugins can be used simply by dropping them into your plugins folder and activating them. I don’t use a ton of plugins compared to some people — I can be a bit picky about what I add. And I’m not going to list every plugin that I’ve got active here, but I thought I’d point out a few of my favorites:

Akismet: There are a lot of people who swear by Bad Behavior or Spam Karma 2. [...]

Posted in Blogs, Plugins, Software, Tech, WordPress | Also tagged Akismet, PHP, plugin, Plugins, this-site, WordPress | 35 Comments

Follow you, follow me

By Dougal | Published: February 15, 2007

Two years ago today, we released WordPress version 1.5. This was a pretty major release that introduced several new features that are still major staples of the current 2.1 branch: the Dashboard, Themes, and Pages. It also added a minor new change which was mildly controversial to some: comments were automatically flagged with the ‘nofollow’ attribute.

The rel="nofollow" idea had good intentions: to give content producers a way to link to another site without implying that they approve of it. [...]

Posted in Blogging, Microformats, Plugins, Search, Spam, WordPress | Also tagged Akismet, commentspam, Google, Metadata, nofollow, PageRank, plugin, WordPress, yahoo | 89 Comments

Upgraded

By Dougal | Published: February 5, 2007

Okay, I think things are finally (more-or-less) back in shape around here. Sorry about the problems you might encountered here over the past few days. I finally upgraded this site to WordPress 2.1, but I encountered some problems along the way. The problems were really indirectly related to the upgrade, and turned out to be my own dumb fault.

On Friday, I decided to use my lunch hour to perform the upgrade. I backed up my database and my wp-content directory, deleted all the old WP files (I traditionally haven’t bothered with that step, but I knew that several files were renamed/outdated, and I wanted to do some general housecleaning anyhow), installed the new ones, and upgraded the database schema via wp-admin/upgrade.php. [...]

Posted in Announcements, Blogs, Personal, Plugins, Themes, WordPress | Also tagged Amazon, PHP, plugin, Plugins, Sandbox, this-site, Upgrades, WordPress | 8 Comments

WordPress 2.1 Released

By Dougal | Published: January 22, 2007

Hot off the presses is the latest feature release of our favorite blogware: WordPress 2.1 “Ella”. You can find a bore-you-to-tears detailed list of bugfixes and feature changes in the Milestone report over on Trac. But here’s my version of the short list of changes:

Tabbed WYSIWYG/Code editing: You can now easily switch back and forth between the WYSIWIG (AKA: RTE, or “Rich Text Editor”) and the old-style editor with quicktags.
Autosave: When editing posts, your changes are automatically saved every two minutes, as long as you’ve set a title.
Spellcheck: The RTE now includes a spelling checker. [...]

Posted in Announcements, Blogs, Software, WordPress | Also tagged Akismet, plugin, Plugins, Releases, Web, WordPress | 21 Comments

Some blog spam cases you might want to watch for

By Dougal | Published: October 27, 2006

I like to think that I’ve got some pretty decent spam prevention measure in place on my server. My mail server uses RBL/DNSBL services and sets maximum limits for certain protocol violations. All my blogs use Akismet for comment spam detection. I’ve got a large number of entries in my comment moderation and blacklist lists. And I hook it all together into my SpamValve plugin, which automatically adds firewall rules to block repeat offenders.

Still, though, occassionally I get bursts of traffic that either aren’t detected by these measures, or that are detected, but the process of handling the connection causes excessive load on the system. [...]

Posted in Blogs, Plugins, Software, Spam, Tech, WordPress | Also tagged Akismet, commentspam, Email, PHP, plugin, Plugins, SpamValve, this-site, WordPress | 12 Comments

Sprint courting bloggers?

By Dougal | Published: February 28, 2006

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I’d have something about the Samsung A920 phone coming up. I don’t have the phone yet, but when I do I’ll surely be posting a review. But in the meantime, let me explain how and why I’m getting this phone, and do a little speculation…

Yesterday morning, mixed in amongst my usual slew of automated system emails and the slurry of spams that make it through my filters, was a message from Sprint. My wife and I use Nextel cell service (now owned by Sprint), and I had recently registered on the Sprint web site for their online account management, so getting email from them wasn’t a surprise. [...]