SPAM
Published Tue, Apr 17 2007 9:38 AM
Technorati Tags: Computers and Internet, Software Development, Blogging, Annoyances
I've updated the site code this morning. The new update should be invisible to most users. If you find something broken, please let me know.
This morning's update was long overdue. As many of you know, I hate SPAM with a passion (not this kind of spam though). Because of this, I've been using the AKismet filter to block spam. It's a very good filter, regularly catching almost every bit of SPAM this site gets hit with.
Occasionaly a SPAM gets through, usually when an exception occurs in the handler. I've fixed that. If an exception occurs in the AKismet processing, the items will be rejected immediately. The most frequent cause for these exceptions that I encountered was when the commenter or the trackback pinger did not supply a User Agent string. That's generally a good indication that they're a bot.
What's worse though is when a valid comment, or a valid trackback gets trapped by AKismet. Up until now I've had no way (in my code) to report false positives to AKismet. I've added code that will let me do that now, and that will restore your comments or trackbacks that AKismet blocks.
If you're a commenter, you shouldn't see any changes, except that your comments will eventually appear on the site after they get through moderation. If you're a trackback pinger, and your ping gets blocked by AKismet, you'll now receive an error notification letting you know that your ping was trapped and is awaiting moderation.
Currently, there are three bloggers that ping this site with trackbacks that regularly get blocked by AKismet. I don't know why AKismet regularly blocks your posts, but I should be able to stop that now, by reporting the false positives. In the past you received no notifications. Now you will.
If any of you have problems with comments, or trackbacks, please let me know. My email address is perri at perrinelson dot com. If you're a spammer, don't bother sending me mail. I won't respond. If you're a legitimate commenter or trackback pinger, I will try to fix the problems.
By the way, please keep your computers up to date with the latest security patches. According to a recent report, botnets are on the rise. You wouldn't want your computer to be assimilated...
If it does become assimilated and starts spamming, I'll block its IP address. Then you won't be able to trackback or comment, even if your comments are legitimate.
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