Day: April 13, 2005

Did a spam test

I was interested to see what WordPress did when I attempted to post a comment through a spam proxy – I didn’t know if the option under “Options->Discussion” to block posts from open proxys would catch it silently, or if it would be caught by and presented under the menu on “Options->SpamKarma”.

I did a “grep poker /var/log/httpd/access| tail -1” and grabbed the IP. A quick telnet showed that it was running an open http proxy server on port 80. So I set that as my proxy server, fired up Safari and attempted to comment on my last entry. SpamKarma got it and presented a warning to the comment poster that it was doing so, which meant that I could go to “Manage->Comments” and review it and delete it.

Ok, so it’s nice to know that when the spammers finally figure out where to spam my blog comments, SpamKarma will be on the case. It’s interesting to see that it’s not silently deleting spam now, which means that the spammers still have not figured out how to attempt to blog spam me. That’s just a little weird.

Still spam free…

As I wrote over a month ago, in Rants and Revelations » Hit me, spammers, I haven’t had any comment spam from random comment spammers since switching from MovableType to WordPress. So far it falsely accused a couple of legitimate comments as being spam for various reasons, and I’ve had to remove comments from my ex-wife, but I haven’t seen anything that you could count as spam.

I’ve looked at my web server, and I don’t see any hits on wp-comments-post that I couldn’t account for. Still seeing lots of hits on the non-functional MovableType comment cgi, though.

Either the comment spammers haven’t figured out WordPress 1.5 yet, or the option that says “Blacklist comments from open and insecure proxies” is silently preventing the comment spammers from even getting to wp-comments-post.

Now if only the referrer spammers would stop hitting every link in my site in spite of the fact that there is no where anyone can see my referrers so they aren’t getting any benefit from chewing up my bandwidth.

Those sorts of meetings are never fun…

We just had a mandatory all-employees (including contractors) meeting. Distilled down to the bare essentials, it comes down to:
“We’re reducing the R&D budget by 30%. We’re going to try and do that by shifting some costs into other budgets, cutting a few projects, pushing back some schedules.

Oh, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll cut staff. We’ll let you know when.

Have a nice day.”