Updates

4 Comments

A few miscellaneous updates:

  • I'm not going to NASFiC. Many thanks to all who volunteered to help out with a possible SH tea party there, and sorry to miss those of you who'll be there. I was kind of bewildered at realizing I wasn't going to go; I'd been pretty much assuming all year that I would be there. But I think I really need a long weekend at home at this point.
  • Got a call this morning from the Ethan Allen folks to let me know my couch and loveseat have arrived! They offered to deliver them tomorrow, but I wasn't quite ready for that—among other things, I'll need to do some furniture rearrangement in my living room first—so they were happy to agree to come on Tuesday instead.
  • My cold seems to have largely abated. Still had a drippy nose for part of this afternoon, but mostly gone. As colds go, this one wasn't so bad.
  • Stephanie went home, Kam's at Burning Man, Lola's at Strawberry; as far as I know, there won't be anyone occupying my guest room all weekend. Perhaps I'll open it up to any Katrina refugees who make it this far west.
  • Comment spam is on the rise. Mary Anne has started receiving something like 400 pieces of comment spam per day from the "Texas hold em poker" people. I'm adapting my comment spam filter, but of course that's a neverending fight. Meanwhile, the gbbbbg people have started swamping my, Dan's, and Mary Anne's journals with a kind of spam I haven't yet adapted the filter to stop. (Joke's on them: they're not including the "http://" part of the URL, so their links don't actually work!) I'm more and more leaning toward moving to Movable Type, even though I know that won't actually fix the problem. Note that Six Apart is offering $30 off for Personal Basic or Personal Unlimited versions of the software through September 30; I hope to have made the switch by then. We'll see.

I'm pretty sure there was more, but I'm blanking on what it might've been. It'll come to me later, no doubt.

4 Responses to “Updates”

  1. Thida

    Hope the dripping and the spam abates soon. 400 is excessive. The “junk handling” feature of Movable Type would appear to be helpful in combating your spam. However it seems like one of those software deals where you’d have to try it first to see. You could try the single free version for yourself and see how it goes.

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  2. Chaos

    I may have asked this before, but how many of your spam comments contain URLs? If it’s 100%, could you just refuse comments with “a href” tags? I know that’d be a pain for your legitimate users, but we can always copy and paste URLs from people’s comments, and it might be easy to do and give you a bit of a break.

    Just a thought.

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  3. Vardibidian

    Dang, and I was griping about the thirty I got yesterday. Feh. Thanks for deleting a bunch of them, anyway.
    Thanks,
    -V.

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  4. Jed

    Thida: Yeah, and I would probably also use MT-Blacklist. My impression is that that gives much better spam-handling features than I’ve been able to hack together in my journal system, but I’ll have to actually try it to find out. And I’m a little concerned that MT will attract more spam, due to being a better-known system.

    Chaos: Good thought, but sadly this latest batch doesn’t contain URLs at all—they’re posting to get people to follow the “web” link. Which is funny because, as with the last huge outbreak we got, the site is now defunct (and the links wouldn’t work anyway due to lack of “http://”), but the spambots keep on spamming. Sigh.

    Anyway, I do count as spam any comment that contains ten or more links in its text; I got that idea from Teresa Nielsen Hayden, I think, though I think her threshold was seven. I didn’t want to disallow all links in comments; in fact, I would like to encourage more people to use proper HTML links rather than just posting plain-text URLs, both for convenience and to avoid window-width problems with the narrow comments window.

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