Category: Geekery

Note to LiveJournal users

Recently I’ve noticed that in Vicki’s blog, my entries on her friend’s page have this weirdo pseudo-link on them. I’ve noticed this as well on a few other people’s, as well. I’m not sure why, but the people who have “friended” “rantsnrevels” are getting my index.xml syndication, which has this problem, but people who have “friended” “ptomblin” are getting the index.rdf, which is a newer interface and probably doesn’t suffer from this problem.
Continue reading “Note to LiveJournal users”

Spammers are more adaptive than viruses…

…and about as pleasant.

Yesterday I noted that the current incarnation of MovableType + MT-Blacklist makes the link in comments into a redirection, probably to reduce the utility of these fields for spammers trying to increase their Google PageRank. So of course what do I find when I wake up this morning? Two comments on very old blog entries with about 5 copies of a spammer’s URL in the body of the text of the comment. Thanks to MT-Blacklist, it only took about five mouse clicks to remove these entries and put the URL they were spamming into my blacklist and check to see if they’d posted any other comments from that IP. Suck on that, spammer.

Never noticed that before…

I never noticed this before, but if you put a URL in when you’re commenting on my blog, it doesn’t actually put the URL in there, but rather puts in a URL for a local redirection CGI that will send you to the correct place. I wonder if that’s to stop comment spammers from getting the Google PageRank points that they’re trying for? I don’t remember this before, so I wonder if it’s something that came along when I upgraded to MT 2.661, or when I installed MT-Blacklist.

I see that Misha’s blog, which uses an older version of MT, doesn’t seem to have this feature.