Eengstro on October 2nd, 2007

More than 90% of the traffic to this blog is merely spambots trying to post spam as comments and trackbacks. Akismet catches almost all of it, so I can mostly ignore it. However, that traffic places an undue burden on the server and clogs my access logs. Since there’s very little real commenting on this [...]

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Eengstro on June 12th, 2007

When I recently re-enabled comments, I enabled the Akismet plugin for Wordpress. I was starting to wonder where all the comment spam was…

As the screenshot shows, in the few days that Akismet has been running on this blog, it caught 146 spam comments. There were no false positives, and no spam escaped. Sweet!
TAKE THAT, [...]

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Eengstro on June 4th, 2007

OK, I’ll try allowing comments again. I’m entering commentland this time with the attitude that “yes, I’ll have to do some moderation”. That’s OK, as long as the spam doesn’t get out of hand.

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Eengstro on May 28th, 2007

I seem to receive a fair amount of referrals from this MySpace profile:
http://www.myspace.com/bobby133
I’ve never met this person. Who is that?

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Eengstro on May 3rd, 2007

Since re-enabling comments, I’ve received several spam posts. There are tools available that can screen and nuke spam comments, but since basically no one reads or comments on this blog anyways, it’s not really worth my time. So, bye bye comments.

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Eengstro on April 16th, 2007

I just upgraded this site to Wordpress 2.1.3. (Read about my last major upgrade, to 2.0.1, here.) The visual editor appears much improved, so I’m going to play with that for a while.
I’ve also re-enabled comments for the time being. We’ll see what the spam situation looks like in a few days or weeks.

Continue reading about Wordpress 2.1.3

Eengstro on May 22nd, 2006

After receiving a barrage of comment spam over the weekend (some of it addressed to Jane, as in “Nice site Jane!”), I have disabled open commenting. One must now be logged in as a subscriber to comment. Conveniently, no one is allowed to register as a subscriber. Problem solved.
If any of my two or three [...]

Continue reading about Comment spam, part deux

Eengstro on May 3rd, 2006

Recently I have been deluged with comment spam in which the spammer first praises my humble website, and then inserts links to various fraudulent and bogus addresses. A typical example (links removed):

Great website! Bookmarked! I am impressed at your work!
tramadol 50 mg | clonazepam | ambien experience | phentermine | clonazepam | “valium online” | [...]

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Eengstro on December 7th, 2005

I am seeing more and more comment spam on this blog. If this continues, I will be forced to disable comments entirely.
Fucking spammers.

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Eengstro on September 2nd, 2005

I had a phone line installed in my new apartment today. Within two hours of plugging in my telephone, I received my first phone call… from a goddammed computer with “an offer for recipients of Medicare”.
WHAT?? I’m twenty-fucking-eight, for Christ’s sake! What makes you think that I’m a recipient of Medicare??
My new phone number went [...]

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