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I’ve had enough!

I’ve had enough of ‘bots posting spam as comments on my blog!

Today while trying to remove hundreds of items of comment spam I removed at least four comments I really wish I still had. Of course, it was to be a quick job and I didn’t do a backup before hand.

It’s not the first time either, I lost all the comments from the Billy Corgan and K-OS concerts because I mistakenly deleted them. Too much comment spam makes the comment section of a blog unreadable and blog comments are important. Blog comments are what keep people blogging about things they know nothing about in check! ….that and there’s a community aspect to it or something.

For those of you who don’t have a blog, especially a wordpress blog, you probably aren’t familiar with comment spam — though you may have seen it. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, most people who read blogs don’t leave comments about poker, debut consolidation, and pron. Many do leave comments about how much they like the blog, but they tend not leave links to poker, debut consolidation, and pron with those comments.

Where is this all coming from?

‘Bots are what all these comments about poker, debut consolidation, and pron are what are coming from. ‘Bot is short for robot. As I recently explained during an interview for a local paper about this blog, ‘bots are computers programmed to scower the internet for blogs and to post comments with links back to their sites. Comment spam is created to get the word out about their site and to increase the value Google assigns to it. The worst part is it’s very easy to create a ‘bot and one ‘bot can make hundreds of posts a second. Many viruses are designed to turn PCs into Spam ‘bots.

WordPress and other blogs and Wiki’s use blacklists to check against words that should not be posted but they only go so far. I find WordPress’ blacklist doesn’t work and the moderation list works, but the interface to reject comments that have been flagged and approve good comments is difficult to use when you’re trying to review hundreds of comments. This is how in the hundreds of spam comments you can mistakenly select a real comment and delete it.

What to do?

Obviously the best strategy is to be proactive and prevent spam comments. Some blog make users type in text from an image only a human could read – but only a fully-abled human, as they are not very accessible. I use a a plugin called Hashcash to ensure the comment page was at least loaded in a proper web browser, though some ‘bots are sophisticated enough to get around this.

If you have access to your MySQL database, either directly or through PHPMyAdmin you can run these SQL queries AFTER you make a backup/export of the database (or just the wp-comments table).

• DELETE FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_author` LIKE '%poker%';
• DELETE FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_author_url` LIKE '%poker%';
• DELETE FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_author` LIKE '%slots%';
• DELETE FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_author_url` LIKE '%slots%';
• DELETE FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_author` LIKE '%Texas%';
• DELETE FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_author_url` LIKE '%pill%';
• DELETE FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_author_url` LIKE '%roulette%';
• DELETE FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_author_url` LIKE '%casino%';
• etc.

Wired Magazine’s Steven Johnson has an article on comment spam

UPDATE: I think this article has more spam than any other rite now 🙁 I have found that I can mass set old posts to close their comments with this SQL statement:

• UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `comment_status` = 'closed' WHERE `post_date` LIKE '2005%'

Thanks to a handy WordPress plugin all posts are set to no longer accept comments after 60 days thanks to this plugin: codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Auto_shutoff_comments.

This afternoon I watched what I thought was shaping up to be a more mundane opening ceremony than Athens: Opera and ballet and no flying land-forms or giant temporary lakes. But then I heard the greatest thing I’ve heard all week.

As the modern dancers left the stage out of the floor appeared the Scuderia Ferarri’s pit crew placing tires on an F1 car driven by test driver Luca Badoer. The car appears to be the 2005 F2005 chassis painted in Olympic colours.

The team lowered Luca down to the floor and he slowly drove the car out to the main stage, set the brake bias to the front and did a number of screaming doughnuts filling the stadium with sound and smoke. I think the whole segment of the ceremony lasted about a minute, but I was jumping up and down with the TV at full volume for the whole thing. It was capped off with a large fireworks display that ringed the stadium.

The T in FIAT stands for Torino. FIAT currently own Ferrari which is also based in Italy in Maranello.

From the nose of the original F2005 car

I recorded (well, MythTV’d) FOX’s 24 and watched it Tuesday night. It’s amazing what you notice when you can pause and rewind TV: I thought I saw John McCain deliver a docket to the conference room in CTU. A quick rewind made me even more certain. I Google’d it and AZCentral.com and the Hill News confirm it. The Hill News pointed out that torture is often employed in 24 and John McCain is not only the lead advocate in the US Senate against torture, but he was tortured himself in Vietnam. In any case it was a good McCameo.

You haven’t seen a real street DJ until you’ve seen this.

www.zippyvideos.com/3328389063290496/eb_proxfade_400_225_web/original

“I wish I knew how to quit you.”

www.mightymcpilgrim.com/films/brokemac/