Blog House » Spams

About Blog House

Kathy — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 22:39:53 +0000

I set this place up as a refuge for blogspotters, back in the days when blogspot was just a tad flaky, and hosting was a good deal more expensive. Since then, blogspot has become a fairly decent place to put your blog (if you don’t mind that “next blog” link on the top that could lead people to who-knows-what). And hosting has become enough cheaper that a mere hosting reseller like me can’t compete. So, I am no longer taking hosting clients.

I will still provide some services I’ve provided before, but I’m mostly intending to turn this site into more of a ‘how to’ site about blogging. Not so much how to write, but some of the little things that newbies don’t know when they decide to start a blog.

Things like, “FTP? What is FTP?” or “What do they mean you have to change permissions on the directory?” — little things like that. The basic stuff. The things all the old-timers on the internet (like me) think that everyone knows. I will be asking others for advice on what to talk about, since I knew how to use FTP (and telnet, not to mention gopher and archie and veronica) before the Mosaic browser came out (just google it). Yeah, I’m an old-timer. So what? I still remember being a newbie, and I remember how confusing it all was. That’s what counts.

I’m going to be putting up some very basic tutorials, recommendations for useful sites and programs and yes — the economy being what it is — some of those will be affilate links but not all of them. I refuse to recommend something just because it has an affiliate program, and I equally refuse to not recommend something because it doesn’t.

I’ll also be posting things about internet safety, spam, scams and other things of that nature. I’ve always hated spammers, and my present job involves email newsletters. Because of the Can Spam act, legitimate newsletters MUST come from a working email address. We have responses from all our clients’ sending addresses forwarded to us, as well as them (so we can check for ‘unscubscribe me’ responses from people who couldn’t find the very obvious unsubscribe button). Ever gotten 30,000 spam emails in a week? I have. I despise spammers, and most of them are scammers as well. (The rest are just fools.)

Clean your comments, sir or ma’am?

Kathy — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 14:13:22 +0000

Update: I’m taking a bit of a break from this service – but if there is an emergency, I will still do it.

I’ve got a WP client who I have admin access to and had left my own email address in the admin section. So, needless to say, I get the moderation queue notifications. Recently, that blog has been getting harrassed by permutations on one theme. They all go to something-top-pharmacy (dot net), and I’ve seen hundreds of permutations of it. It was this particular client who inspired me to go and change the moderation.php to make it check ‘delete’ by default, instead of ‘do nothing’. I got tired of clicking.

So, I did a search for this bottom-feeding-scum-pharmacy along with the term “comment spam” to see if anyone had gotten tired enough of them to come up with some sort of block (from the site, not just via a blacklist or moderation queue). Didn’t find any, but boy did I find blogs, mostly MT blogs, with lots and lots and lots of comment spam they’d never gotten rid of.

So, I’m offering a new service. Call it “blog cleaning lady, if you will”. If you have a blog with spam problems, or know someone who does, please read on. And if you like the idea, please link, so I don’t get tempted to start spamming blogs with ‘remove your spam’ offers.

I’ll charge about 1/2 cent (US) per spam to get rid of the stuff, with a minimim of $5 and a maximum of $150 (rounded up or down to the nearest dollar). The max is because once you get up into tens of thousands of spams, you have so many ‘like’ spams that can be found with one specific regexp search that you can delete many hundreds at a time… It doesn’t really take me much longer to delete 50,000 spams than 20,000. The ones that really take the time are the ones that sneak in once or twice and leave “nice site!” and just one link to their site. The min is because even if you have only 10 spams, I’ve still got to look through everything to find them. And if you have only 10, you probably don’t need me anyway.

spam spam spam

Kathy — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 13:34:17 +0000

Quick fix for trackback spam on WP. Rename your wp-trackback.php to something like wp-trackback.php.txt so they can’t find it, and so it won’t run even if they do.

I’m testing some more complex fixes/blocks so I’d really appreciate getting trackbacks for testing, especially from people using blog software other than WordPress. Mail me: blogmeister at this site (you can figure it out) if your trackback doesn’t get through. Thanks much!

PS… I’m doing trackbacks to a few others who have been hit… that I’ve been helping out. You guys can delete this. I’m just doing it to be sure I haven’t killed your trackbacks or anything.

[last update, I hope] IF you understand htaccess redirects, there is a zip file here that has some tricks that should help, along with explanations. If you do NOT understand htaccess redirects, please ask someone who does know to help. If you are one of my bloghouse clients, or an ex-client with another host who has lazily left me with access, I may have already updated your htaccess file. And I will be trying to get to everyone I can. If you are using front page, I have no idea how to do anything with htaccess without blowing up FP. I’m told it’s possible but I don’t know how to do it.

If you can’t handle zip files for some reason, mail me and I’ll send it to you in text. (Trying to keep bots and spiders away from it, even though the info is available elsewhere, the longer it takes them to find out what is going on, the longer it takes them to find another way to get through. )

Update, WP users who don’t understand htacess or can’t use it because of your host, check the spampop plugin at Candy Genuis’ site. She also has modified Drupal’s comment module to do the same thing, Drupal users may want to ask for a copy of that module.