WordPress Fights Spam

Nick MomrikLeave a comment

As I mentioned on Friday, I had deactivated my spam prevention plugins. It’s been about 60 hours, but all of spam fighting techniques that are built into WordPress are working extremely well.

One thing I noticed however was pingbacks automatically being approved. I had trackbacks moderated by a plugin I wrote, but otherwise they would have been approved also. Since they weren’t from sites in my link list, they should have been going to moderation. Well, this morning I took a browse through the code for 1.5.1 (I’m using the latest and greatest) and I found a bug with pingback and trackback white listing. WP was marking every PB and TB as white listed. It wasn’t ever possible for them to not be white listed, so I fixed the code and submitted a patch. Now I’ve even deactivated my Moderate Trackback plugin since I don’t need it either.

MtDewVirus and 2 Hole Cards are now completely free of all spam prevention plugins. I keep a few there for emergencies, but they aren’t activated at the moment.

If you’re curious about my settings in WP, here they are:

  1. Anyone can register = OFF
  2. Users must be registered and logged in to comment = OFF
  3. An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below) = OFF
  4. Comment author must fill out name and e-mail = ON
  5. Comment author must have a previously approved comment = ON
  6. Hold a comment in the queue if it contains more than 5 links.
  7. Blacklist comments from open and insecure proxies = ON
  8. Comment Moderation words = NONE
  9. Comment Blacklist words – I do have 7 words listed here. Contact me if you want them.

That’s all there is to it.

Back at Party

Nick MomrikLeave a comment

With Party‘s redeposit bonus I couldn’t resist switching back over from UB. After making my deposit the bonus didn’t show up in my account, so I had to contact customer support this morning. I’m happy to say they fixed the problem in a few minutes. I’m going back to the $1/2 6-max tables at Party, with 4 up at a time. The pace of play is slower than at UB, so it’s much easier to keep up with multiple short-handed tables.

After getting the bonus funds I played for a few hours this morning and broke even at the tables. During that time, I cleared almost 1/3 of the 1400 raked hands that I needed. My main focus was to play a solid game and not let any bad beats get to me. I let a couple of bets slip away, but overall I did pretty well.

I ran some errands during the day and jumped back on for a few hours tonight. Again, my play was solid for the most part. I had a some bluffs at the wrong time, but not too many. I was 4-tabling again and one thing I’ve noticed is that the rate at which I would get beat by a backdoor draw or a runner runner seems so much higher because I’m playing to many tables at once. The beats did get to me a couple of times, but for the most part I kept it under control. I finished down about $50 for the day, but cleared the entire $200 bonus, so overall it was a +$150 day.

Looking through my spreadsheet and Poker Tracker, I noticed that I haven’t had a winning day at the ring games since the 11th. That’s not really a good indicator of anything because I took an entire week off from poker. I felt pretty good about my play today. It was much better than it had been over the past couple of weeks. Slowly but surely I’ll get my game back and build the bankroll up too. Another thing I noticed in Poker Tracker was that I’m only $1.14 ahead for online ring games! How does that happen when I have a bankroll of over $2100? One big tournament win and bonus funds, that’s how.

Back to the Grind

Aside Nick MomrikLeave a comment

Last night after work I decided to step back into the ring. I had some cash left in my UB account so I sat down at two $1/2 6-max tables. It was more of the same. Suckouts everywhere. They are causing me to go on tilt. I see tilt coming, but it’s too late. This […]

Using WordPress 1.5

Aside Nick MomrikLeave a comment

The site is now using WordPress 1.5, the latest and greatest version of the best blogging software the web has to offer. I’ve added a contact form, which can be accessed in the Navigation section on the right or by clicking my name in the footer. You won’t notice much different around the site, but […]

Answers.com

Aside Nick MomrikLeave a comment

Answers.com boasts “The best definitions and explanations for over 1 million topics.” It’s different from Google and I know I’ll get some use out of it. For instance, search Google for “poker” and you get a list of web sites related to poker, but if you search Answers for “poker” you get a definition, encyclopedia […]

I Code

Nick Momrik1 Comment

Today was the first day in a long time that I didn’t want to leave work at 4:30. I’ve been coding a program for the past week and because of the short work day I didn’t get time to work on it until almost 4:00. I was just getting into the zone and found out where my bug was when a co-worker mentioned it was time to go home. Time flies when you’re doing what you like.

I’m pretty excited about the program and it helps to remind me of what I really love doing. The program is written in VB.NET and interacts with a SQL server. It basically pulls records about everyone affiliated (students, faculty, staff, alumni, etc.) with SVSU from a text file, compares it to the data in the database used by our call tracking software (HEAT), and updates the database. I’ve had plans for this program dating back 6 months ago when I requested the data files. It’s just a shame it took 6 months to get someone to spend 10 minutes out of their day to add a few lines of code to their script that would FTP me the daily download file.