The weather here sucks so bad I’ve precanceled my back treatments for tomorrow cause there’s no way in hell I’m going to drive an hour in this shit. On the plus side to this weather, I’ve had time to work on some of my sites and servers. The web server that hosts this site, the wiki, etc. was having some stability issues over the last week and after some emails back and forth with the guys that run it, everything has been resolved (as far as we can tell) and all the sites/domains are back to 100%.
On the topic of the wiki, since the server was having stability and speed issues I decided to change the back-end software that runs it to something that utilizes a database to see if that helps. Sadly the new software uses a different form of Wiki Syntax so it’s taking a little longer than I originally planned. You can find out a little more info about that clicking the link in the last paragraph.
Akismet, a plugin, addon, whatever the hell you want to call it, works wonders. For those that don’t know, it takes all the comments sent it and checks them for Spam links and other things to detect and combat unwanted/useless shit. If you jump to the very bottom of the page (in the footer) you’ll notice a little box that states how much spam has been detected and avoided. Sadly the software isn’t 100% accurate and has caught a few comments that it shouldn’t have, but the best part of the software is that once you’re acknowledged the poster as valid it wont bother auto-blocking them (it will still check each post, but will allow them to show if they aren’t marked as spam). I’ve had friends comment about Akismet being crap software how it misses a lot of stuff etc. and they sent me a screen shot of their control panel, practically bragging how shit it was… I took one look and just responded “You moron”. The comments listed as spam WERE spam. Spammers have gotten smart to some of the software used against them and started writing canned responses that at first glance seem valid and you allow those through… this is when they have the chance to pretty much spam the hell out of you before you notice. When you’ve written a post for example like the “Happy Holidays” post I wrote a little while back and get a comment that says something along the lines of “Wow, great post, although I don’t agree with what you’ve said or done 100% I still bookmarked your blog and plan to keep reading it later” you’d think, that’s cool, allow the comment, but if you actually read the sender/poster’s information you’d realize that the comment came from “Free Viagra, blah blah blah, for more info visit this great online pharmacy…..”.
I swear, I don’t believe in “capital punishment” (fully anyway) but I think that every found spammer should have a finger, thumb, penis, etc. fucking cut off… the first time they get caught, they get to name the body part they lose, the second time they’re caught, they take a consensus of those targeted by the spammer to vote on what that asshole loses. I forgot the rest of the point I was going to make, so oh well.
I have less than 2 hours to complete my homework, so I’ll get around to doing that and add more to the blog later. My head hurts.
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