site updates

It seems that the amount of spam comments my blog receives is directly linked to how old the blog is - the older it gets, the more junk it gets thrown at it.

Akismet has done a marvelous job in blocking most of the spam - it’s caught nearly 40,000 spam comments so far - but alas, it’s not enough. Every day, I get 1 or 2 comments to be moderated that are total junk; apparently someone really wanted to spam my site during the night, because when I checked my email, I had 10 comments to moderate, all of which were spam.

To (hopefully) cut back on the amount of spam I need to manually check, I’ve just installed the Bad Behavior plugin, which catches spambots in the act, long before they’ve had a chance to actually post anything. I don’t really know how this works - at the time of posting this, they’re claiming it works via black magic - but if it works, I don’t really care. I’ll be thankful.

In the unlikely chance that Bad Behavior blocks you from commenting, you can get in touch with me at: myfirstname @ my domain name. I’ll whitelist your IP address for you.

To my dear spammers who have stuck with me this long: hah! I hope I don’t see much of you anymore.

Update: So much for my hopes. I checked my email today (the day after setting up Bad Behavior), and found 2 spam comments to be moderated.

Bad Behavior is indeed working - it’s caught around 200 spam bots so far - but I also had over 100 spam emails hit Akismet. 2 of those got through, and I’m not really sure why. They’re not subtle in anyway, they’re just comments with tons of links about porn, photos, etc. Akismet has literally blocked thousands of comments just like these, and yet some keep popping up in my moderation list. It’s strange.

I’m having my account at A Small Orange moved to a different server, due to how problematic the Tom server has been recently - too much downtime! During the DNS propagation, you all might see the old site or the new one. It shouldn’t take too long for the technical bits to straighten themselves out (especially if you use OpenDNS, which you should), so - see you on the other side.

Update: Move is complete. The server is up, but alas - I’m still running into damn near constant timeout problems. I think my time with ASO may be coming to a close.

Update: Hmm. On a hunch, I just disabled WP-Shortstat, due to how slowly the stat page runs usually. Clicking around my site quickly didn’t cause any timeouts, so maybe it was Shortstat slowing down the MySQL. Can slow-running MySQL cause a site-wide timeout? Would that make sense? Any code geeks ’round here?