Sat, 05 Mar 2005

Writebacks and Other Administrivia

Well, I have recovered from last weekend's SPAM assault, and have re-implemented writebacks, using WriteBackPlus from Tony Shadwick's site, which was in turn based on the original expansion of the writebacks plugin by Fletcher Thompson Penny. Note that Mr. Penny has apparently given up on Blosxom due to being continually godsmacked by referer and comment SPAM. And that's a shame, since this site and many others use several of his fine plugins.

I've also installed the cookies plugin to make it easier for you to post writebacks.

The writebackplus plugin uses the MT Blacklist to catch a great many "repeat offenders". But there's more antispam technology to the page than meets the eye ...

You may notice that my initial little antibot ID number is gone. I was correct that it couldn't be digested by a bot, but, alas, I never considered the possibility that the spamming scum would actually take the time to surf the site and leave a real writeback to see how the system worked - then database the results and sell the database with their spamming software! So I also installed nospam, which is a clever little way around the password problem. And there are alot of other tweaks I can make as spammers catch on to these - but I've decided not to give up on writebacks. They're an essential part of the whole "zen" of blogging, and MacRaven would be a lesser place without them.

Finally, I installed scrub from J. Clark ( and I added his blog back to the blogroll, from which it had been removed late last year due to inactivity). And like Mr. Clark, I now have the .htaccess file from Hel - trying to shut off referer SPAM.

You may also note some changes to the "bumper stickers" in the left sidebar: there's a new Blosxom logo courtesy of Bryan Bell, one of whose themes I adapted for my old Radio blog. I gotta get some Blosxom swag as soon as I sell enough eggs!

I also moved the weather ticker back to the bottom of the sidebar, reduced the moon phase graphic and expanded the link to Firebox.

It's been a busy week, and I've got a lot to blog about, but it may have to wait until tomorrow (or maybe not - we'll see) as I'm pretty bushed. Time to crack a cold one and watch a movie or two.

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Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
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