Currently browsing: Ewwww…I don’t like SPAM

I love akismet

I don’t remember why I never installed it, but a few months ago I finally installed (or rather, activated) Akismet for WordPress.  Actually, now that I think about it, I think it was because I didn’t have an API key … but anyways …

It’s been a God-send.  Don’t get me wrong, Bad Behavior has been a good little soldier too.  But it couldn’t catch everything, and was unfortunately blocking a lot of valid traffic.  BUT, after installing Akismet, my spam comments and trackbacks went from a steady stream to nil.  I did notice, however that I had received a bit of an “attack” … over the past 48 hours, there have been over 400 spam comment post attempts — I say ‘attempts’ because they had slipped through Bad Behavior, but Akismet caught ‘em. 

Check it out, over the last 3 months, it’s blocked exactly 1000:

Sweet.

New plug

I meant to type this up last night when I implemented it, but I fell asleep. I know, I’m such a goober, hehe.

Anyways, I was thumbing through the WordPress Wiki looking for a search mod and something caught my eye … “Bad Behavior” … the name alone hooked me.

It turns out that Michael Hampton’s Bad Behavior is a comment spam prevention tool. It monitors the traffic to your blog and helps keep evil spammers/spambots from accessing your blog, thereby preventing the deposition of steaming hot piles of crap (aka comment spam) when they visit.

Ooooooh me likie already!

I turned it on last night and left the logging option set to “verbose” just to see what all it would log … within 9 hours, I had a 12mb table full of logs! Man, it logs everything. (heh, which is probably why ‘verbose’ mode is not recommended, LOL)

Needless to say, this one’s a keeper. I fired off a feedback email to the author and added Bad Behavior’s plug link to my Toolbox.

Yay.

If I get a chance later today, I’ll post some log screenshots.   Scratch that, got something better: log snippets.

Random babble, updates, upgrades, oh my!

I’m psyched … I had a recruiter contact me this morning about a web development job in Birmingham. (my inner teenager is doing backflips and screaming ‘YAY!!!!!!’) :mrgreen:

I’m still psyched about Saturday too, hehe. The thought of performing again both terrifies and thrills me, so we’ll see how it goes. I plan on giving the manager a call tonight to see what their schedule is. If I remember correctly, tournaments are the first Wednesday of every month, so I have plenty of time to practice. (and I am *so* out of practice!)

Jim’s being really supportive of all this. He thinks I should both join the tournaments and try to get a recording gig. And I have to confess that I’ve wanted to record some of my new material so badly! I’m trying not to get my hopes up too high about anything: the music, the job, etc. But I can still hope.

Something I thought of this morning that I had forgotten to mention in my note about Pap’s funeral: inappropriate behavior during ‘serious’ occasions (such as funerals). Someone was griping about something tacky that happened at her sisters wedding a few weekends ago and I started thinking about my uncle Larry taking pictures at the funeral. (wtf!?) Who in their right mind takes PICTURES at a funeral!? (only my uncle Larry apparently)

*shrugs*

I was reading in the WordPress support forums last night about an exploit, but never did see what it was. They’re really good about releasing patches and fixes (and whole upgrades) for serious bugs, exploits, and the like. I had applied the minor patch last night, and this morning my blog is telling me that it’s outdated again, LOL.

Whiny little buggers, ain’t they? Always wanting ‘dem patches!

So guess what I’ll be doing after Jessie goes to bed tonight. *grins* If my site goes down, you’ll know why … (read: Nicki fscked something up, LOL!)

Anyways, it’s almost 2pm. Most everyone in the office is outside smoking — I swear, they take smoke breaks every 15 minutes! So I take chocolate breaks now … that’s my vice, and I’m sticking to it!

I’ve spent most of my day surfing the webservers looking for outdated and exploitable scripts. We have a *TON* of the old Matt’s FormMail scripts all over one server, so I wrote custom PHP scripts for each instance. *shakes head* I swear … and these people wonder why they’re being targeted by spammers? Some numskull was using one of the formmail.pl files to spam AOL, so AOL blocked 3 of our domains last week. It was a mini-nightmare because about half of our clients on that server use AOL.

Oh well, hopefully I won’t have to endure this too much longer. *crosses fingers* When I grow up, I’d like a real job please.

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