Spam, n. An unrequested and unwanted commercial message usually delivered through email, or as comment on a web site. Here I discuss some of my spam experiences, and how I’m avoiding getting more of them.
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April 2nd, 2008, by Rich, in Spam, Tech, Website, WordPress.
Something’s broken on the database that runs this site, specifically there’s b0rkage in the comment table, and the ssh daemon is not reachable. Perhaps it’s to do with the larger than normal amount of spam that’s been arriving today (for “larger than normal” read: one metric truckload). More info later after I’ve had a poke around. Film at 11. More…
March 13th, 2008, by Rich, in Open Source, Spam, Tech, Website, WordPress.
I’m in the process of rewriting the Worst Offenders plugin for the soon-to-be-released WordPress 2.5. Before I make a tested and polished version of the code globally available, I’d be interested to hear from anyone who’d like to alpha test it.
As before Worst Offenders works cooperatively with other anti-spam plugins: its primary purpose is identifying and deleting the comments that are 100% definitely spam (sent by the very worst offenders) so that any “false positives” (sent by real genuine humans) can be rescued from the spam bin! More…
March 21st, 2007, by Rich, in Spam, Website, WordPress.
It’s only 15 months since I mentioned the rocket-like acceleration of Akismet which went from a standing start to the point where it had fended off a million spam messages for its users in just 4 months. If things had continued at that pace it would have squashed a cool 5 million spams by now. More…
June 8th, 2006, by Rich, in Spam, WordPress.
My spam counter in Akismet has been steadily rising of late, and it’s been approaching 10,000 caught spams very quickly. Yesterday it went through 9,950 and with my average of over 100 spams per day it should have gone through the 10,000 barrier by now. But instead I’ve had about 3 spams today. Did I just find an off button for spam? More…
June 4th, 2006, by Rich, in Spam, WordPress.
This last few weeks the site has been very heavily hit by comment spammers hawking their usual reprobate websites and wasting internet bandwidth. Akismet has been doing a sterling job of catching this spam and not one message has made it onto the site (I wrote about Akismet’s effectiveness in the pre-launch testing previously). In the bad old days before Akismet I’d have to go through the “unmoderated comments list” in order to find the occasional real comment amidst all the spam, this is no longer necessary, which is wonderful. Comment-Spam-Nirvana has not been reached yet, however. More…
November 5th, 2005, by Rich, in Spam.
I’m hoping to spend some time over the next ‘n’ weeks understanding the data generated from the mynicemailat domain, though I’m a bit busy with real experiments at the moment, so I intend to do it by thinking aloud here as I get the opportunity. More…
October 25th, 2005, by Rich, in Spam, WordPress.
This website - like any website that allows readers to submit comments - receives comment-spam, usually advertising medicines, gambling, or other vices.
I’ve been trialling a new anti-comment-spam plugin since mid September. It’s called Kismet, it’s from Automattic, (hence Akismet for short) and it’s working very well. More…
September 17th, 2005, by Rich, in Security, Society, Spam, WordPress.
Hopefully I just spoiled a spammer’s whole week. How? I bought the domain that he’s trying to promote (MyNiceMailAt.com) before he did. More…
August 25th, 2005, by Rich, in Spam.
I think this may be a mildly new twist on email and referral spam: using referral spam to advertise a message that’s stored in an unused public newsgroup, thus avoiding spam filters. More…
June 10th, 2005, by Rich, in Spam, WordPress.
Referral and Comment spam continues unabated, with several new domains this week, and several new machines doing the spamming. Here I present two regularly updated URl’s that list the domains and ip addresses of the machines that are hitting me, and the two scripts that generate them. More…
