dom.blog

*New page alert!*

Check out my new little work of art, If Dell Sold Religion. I like to think it combines my two favourite topics: computers and ‘faith’.

I’ve been updating my version of the plugin and, unfortunately, you will now have to re-subscribe to email updates from this blog using the form at the bottom of this page. The good news is that this is the last time you’ll ever have to – as the terms have changed. I can now see the email addresses of everyone who has subscribed and will automatically re-sign you up if I upgrade again.

(Don’t subscribe if you aren’t happy about this, although I promise not to share any addresses with any third party, as usual.)

Comment spam, as I’ve found today, can be a real problem for blogs. I take a very strict attitude, I will never allow my blog to be hijacked in this way, and will manually delete every single piece of scum if I have to.

My first response this afternoon was to do just that, until I realised the attacks wouldn’t stop anytime soon. So next, I tried blocking specific IP addresses, first for posting comments, then for the whole site. This failed, because of the huge amount of addresses used by the enemy.

Next, I moved on to Comment Control, a Nucleus plugin. This solved the main problem, as every single comment now had to be moderated by me. The spammers have been defeated, but at the cost of a lot of my time.
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Well that’s some measure of success I suppose Sorry guys, but you’re not in luck, I delete all spam comments immediately and ban the IP ranges immediately. Intriguingly, this particular plague of bots from Japan post little historical quotes with each comment. Ahh… spam with class.

Most obviously the new banner, of course. Have you ever noticed, Nic updates his site and a few weeks later I mysteriously get round to changing mine?

In other news, I’m now on study leave for mock GCSE exams. But the cliché about sitting in a gym is over, our class gets the luxury of a nice room upstairs, with carpets and everything. They’ve given this to our class for almost every exam for years now, perhaps we’re just ‘better’ in some way than the other classes? Yeah, that must be it.