Everything has a reason

Ok, they almost got me. I received a comment here on the website, saying this

When I originally commented I clicked the -Notify me when new comments are added- checkbox and now each time a comment is added I get four emails with the same comment. Is there any way you can remove me from that service? Thanks!

I started thinking fast: I have to resolve this immediately!

I’m gonna publish this comment and excuse me for it. Of course. Ok, so I have to try to dig up that plugin that does that. I know there is one, I saw it once. I wanted to try it, that’s for sure. But did I actually install it? Hmm. Must be. Or isn’t it? What does it say again? Let me see who added it? Ehm. Wait. This is a NEW visitor with an unknown e-mail address… So he didn’t made a first comment at all. And wait, I don’t have such a plugin installed. Waaaiiitt a minute!

The URL that he’s providing, as well as his “name” has much to do with penny thingy auctions and stuff, money for sure. This is just plain spam. And they almost got me. They get smarter, oh yes! But not quite smart enough!

*marks comment as spam*

I’m shocked.

Lately, I receive a lot of spam on my blog. Not automated, but just some under-payed drug addicts from Poland and the Ukraine who desperately need some cash and thus manually spam around. As I found in my analytics, the search term “BL00DY TEETH” is one of the ways they arrive here. Indeed, I did some pretty gross posts a couple of years ago when my wisdom teeth had to be removed.

One of the images I posted together with the story, was a very bloody one (which I wanted to post as top image for this post, but I changed my mind since I want to keep this blog safe for all ages.)

I removed the category on which they land when using that as a keyword, then I did a search on the keyword myself (warning: save search is off!).

And that is the point in time I startled.

I realised I didn’t just shock the world around me at that time by posting an image like that, I also started to attract dirty minds and fetishists to this website. And three other weblogs (the kinds you really don’t want to land upon, trust me) just copied the image, didn’t even take the time to rename it, and posted it without credits on their blogs.

Oh well.
At least the originals are still around here. Somewhere.

It’s just another poof. Whatever you post online, will stay online forever. And ever.

Today, I upgraded WordPress to version 2.8.3. I upgrade immediately when a new version is available. And these days, I don’t even test this. I really like WordPress as it is one of the most decent, new-technology, web 2.0 driven, extensible blog I’ve ever seen. The upgrade goes automatically. And it works like a charm.

Well, almost.

People started to complain that they couldn’t post any comments to my blog anymore. They got the notice of SpamBam that spam comments were not allowed and JavaScript should be enabled. But users are definitely NOT spambots and JavaScript was enabled, so I started a search.

SpamBam uses a random key to determine whether the posted key was the same as the previously generated one. This key was regenerated after posting the comment. I assume that WordPress now calls the do_action(‘comment_form’… not only when generating the page, but while posting the comment as well. And there’s the problem. SpamBam registers the generation of the key in the comment_form action, so the key is regenerated so that it doesn’t match the key on the blog page anymore.

Since I didn’t immediately find a solution for this and since SpamBam isn’t updated since ages, I started to search for another anti-spam plugin that doesn’t work with captcha‘s (extremely annoying and not working after all) and is really reliable… I found WP-SpamFree which seems to use about the same technology as SpamBam, but a little more sophisticated and it was updated only recently. It feels more solid and commenting now works again.

I now enabled a logging feature to see how many spam comments are blocked, just to see whether it is actually working. And ehm… hopefully I don’t end up in receiving spam comments again. But I doubt it. Since its installation, WP-SpamFree blocked 9,912 spam comments already.

Those Russian spam-girls are really desperate, I guess. Their newest target: Flickr…

Junkmail… Sometimes, it’s realy funny to know what they want to sell you. Take these mails I got today:

Phu-lease… If your limited offer has been sold out, why bother sending an e-mail? “Do you want Rolex?” Well if I would, I’d be too late wouldn’t I?

Classified vertically.