Tag: Internet

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.

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 […]

Save Toby

Aside Nick Momrik79 Comments

Now here’s a way to make some easy money from a few suckers. Threaten to kill a cute little bunny named Toby. The guy running this site is going to kill Toby on June 30th, 2005 if he doesn’t get $50,000 in donations and merchandise purchases. Amazingly, he’s already took in over $14,000! After all, […]

Trackback Spammers Are Back

Aside Nick MomrikLeave a comment

The trackback spammers are back in full force. When I checked my email this morning I had over 180 and it’s continuing through the morning at a rate of several per minute. Talk about a pain in the ass! Don’t they realize that their info isn’t every getting onto the site. It’s getting flagged and […]

Read Feeds

Aside Nick MomrikLeave a comment

Do you use a feed reader/service to keep track of blogs that you read? Currently I just jump on my sites and check the link list to see which sites have recently updated…pretty dumb way of doing it. I know there are countless sites out there that will store your blogroll and let you see […]

bbPress

Nick MomrikLeave a comment

I just installed bbPress to give it a test drive. When I read that it’s supposed to be simple, I guess I was thinking WordPress simple. Think Notepad simple. The forum software is nowhere near being ready for use on a site.

Now, I totally understand that the project just started development 2 weeks ago and is being built from the ground up. I also understand that the version number is 0.01, so I shouldn’t expect much. And to be fair…I didn’t really expect much. I expected a bare bones piece of software to run forums on a site. Well, it’s bare bones alright.

After registering, there isn’t even a way to change your password, so you’re stuck with the generated one. Also, from a developer’s stand point, it would be a PITA to template the system right now. It doesn’t come with a default CSS file.

I’m sure that bbPress will turn out to be a great piece of software one day. Just take a look at how far WordPress has come in a year.

Now my search begins for a simple piece of forum software. I don’t want avatars, file attachments, and all that jazz. I want people to be able to post topics and reply to them. I want something that can be incorporated with the design of a WordPress site. I might be searching for awhile…

Update: I think I found the perfect package with Phorum. It has a very nice templating system. I think I’ll just need to edit the header, footer, and css files to setup the design I want. 😀

Update #2: Phorum is pretty slick. See it in action on the new Poker Chip Tricks Forums.

Matt > Bill

Nick Momrik2 Comments

Matthew Mullenweg is like the Bill Gates of Internet software. But then again, maybe he’s not. All of Matt’s software is Open Source (free to use, free to modify). Oh, and his software works. Did I mention he listens to his users? Or how about the fact that he answers every single one of his email messages? So I take that back…he’s not like Gates at all. He’s more better!

  • Matt is one of the most popular bloggers in the entire universe at Photo Matt.
  • He’s the lead developer for WordPress, the best blogging software available.
  • Dougal Campbell teammed up with Matt to launch Ping-o-Matic, your one stop for letting sites around the web know that you’ve updated your blog.
  • Over the holidays and out of the blue, he started a new piece of forum software from scratch, bbPress.
  • Just today I came across automattic.com, another domain registered to Matt. Not quite sure what he has in store here, but I now know that “Some things are automattic, some things aren’t.”