Blogging Roller

Ugg boots, sports jerseys, World of Warcraft (WOW) gold.... do you like those key words, spammers? Tough crap, you're not getting a link.

I'm posting this blog entry for the sole purpose of tempting, frustrating and basically just thumbing my nose at the idiotic comment spammers that attack this blog every day. Even though I blog about once a month these days, I get hit many times a day with spam. No worries, of course, the Akismet plugin stops 99% of them, but every once and a while, I notice the spam, bulk delete it and remember how much spammers suck.

Since I upgraded this site to Roller 3.2-dev, with pluggable comment validators and Akismet support, not a single spam has gotten through the system. Over the weekend I saw 20-30 email messages like this:

This comment failed validation for these reasons:

* Akismet service (akismet.com) says comment is spam
* Trackback from site/page that does not link to your weblog entry

Brisa wrote: [Trackback] nothing here 

That's music to my ears. Die spammers die!

This week I've been working on a new feature for Roller called Comment Validators, which makes it possible for Roller site admins to plugin validation rules to be run against comments. If a comment fails validation it is marked as spam, put into the blog's moderation queue and the blog's owner is notified with a list of the reasons that validation failed.

I commited the work to SVN yesterday, so now we've got an excess-size validator that checks for comments larger than a threshold, an excess links validator that checks for comments with too many links and what may be the most useful validator of all the AkismetCommentValidator -- which checks comments against the Akismet anti-spam service. I'm not sure how stable the Roller trunk is right now, but I decided to risk a deploy so now this blog is protected by Akismet.

Update 1: Yowza. The site crashed last night and after a little googling, I think I may have run into a Hibernate bug (HH-1579). I turned on the JVM -server option. Let's see how that goes.

Update 2: The JVM -server flag seems to fix the Hibernate problem. I wrote a note about the problem on the roller-dev mailing-list just in-case somebody else runs into it.

Ian Kallen: I'm not condemning AdSense per se, it's a great service and revitalized web advertising after the flame-out a few years ago. But black-hat SEO's have definitely cranked up the game over the last year or so and are putting the whole market at risk again. Google may not be particularly motivated to go out and find the abuse but they have to act against it when you bring it to their attention. Watch this video.

I just returned from Chapel Hill where I worked for about three hours to rid my brother's computer of all of the various adware, spyware, evil crap, worthless trash, and malicious idiocy that had accumulated over the first six months of his Windows-based computer's life. Three hours! If not for the Heavy Metal Parking Lot and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog videos we enjoyed, I would be ready to rant and rage right now. Evil trash indeed.