Four spam-free days and counting, since I implemented my new spam prevention system. This is pretty good, especially since Google just recently started indexing my site again (long story, for another time) and that has led to a lot more page views, as well as seemingly more incoming spam attempts.
I was just thinking about this brief exchange over on Dan’s blog, as well as some recent stuff I’ve been dealing with at work, and realizing that the endless stream of Internet Explorer security vulnerabilities is actually a tremendous blessing to us web developers.
Here’s why: While IE6’s implementation of web standards is still woefully inadequate, it’s certainly miles ahead of their 5.x versions, and I don’t even want to talk about any versions before that. Thankfully, the severity of the flaws in these earlier versions has basically made it a requirement for every Windows user to keep automatic updates on, and always get the latest patches and upgrades to IE. No one in their right mind would run a Windows box without keeping up on the patches these days, just because there are so many exploits out there.
This has the pleasant side effect of web designers being able to safely limit their testing of their pages to IE6, since anyone running any earlier version of the browser would have much more serious problems than their page looking funny.
As you’ve probably noticed if you’ve been reading this blog (or Dan’s) for a while, I’ve been trying out various alternatives for preventing comment spam on my blog, and today I just started a new experiment, which I believe will be very successful.
The two main anti-spam plugins for Wordpress are “Spam Karma 2″ and Akismet (there are others too, but these are the main ones I’ve used). WP2 comes with Akismet preinstalled, so most Wordpress blogs probably use that, unless the blog owner is savvy enough to experiment with other plugins and/or gets tired of how much spam Akismet still lets slip through the cracks. Anyway, Akismet works by forwarding the comment to a server and having the server give a yes/no reply as to whether it is considered spam or not. SK2 works completely on the blog server, analyzing a comment in a number of ways (which you can add to with plugins), and gives a comment positive and negative “karma” points as it is evaluated, which will ultimately determine its fate. I could go into more technical details, but you can search my previous entries for more on what I think of the merits of the different approaches.
Today (just now actually) I moved back to using SK2, and added a check against Akismet as a SK2 plugin, so that the Akismet reply becomes part of the overall karma of the comment, but is not the only line of defense. I expect to get dramatically fewer spams now, and I will be tweaking the configuration if necessary over the next few months, and perhaps eventually packaging up what I’m using and releasing it with the default settings configured to what I’ve found works for me.
We saw Thank You for Smoking last night, and I liked it a lot. I think it was partially because it was just a good, funny movie, and partially because I’m also a guy who enjoys to argue a bit too much, even about things that I could easily be wrong about.
There was a perfect example of everything that’s wrong about overzealous adaptation of “AJAX” and other “Web 2.0″-ish techniques over at The Daily WTF this week.
PS - If you’re a programmer, the Daily WTF is a great source of laughs, and they have an RSS feed for convenient reading.
I’ve decided to start referring to pretty much everyone I know as “illegal drivers”, since I’m pretty sure everyone I know regularly violates the speed limit laws. Even if some don’t, the generalization is “true enough” that I won’t worry about lumping people in who it doesn’t apply to.
My next step is to lobby to have speeding (which is already illegal) made into a felony. While I’m at it, I’m going to tack on a bit about making it a felony for the gas and automobile companies to aid in these criminal acts by supplying those rotten illegals with the means to perform their nefarious activity, undermining the safety of our roads and our society.