Technical Ramblings

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

After doing some log watching yesterday, I realized that almost 25% of the hits to my site were people attempting to spam a now-defunct weblog with trackback spam, as well as using spam referrers. After watching this for a while, I got pretty tired of seeing all these ads for poker and so on, so I started going on a rampage. No more Mr. Nice Guy, I thought. These machines aren’t even hitting valid URIs: they’re spamming something that hasn’t even existed for the past two months. I’m tired of it.

So I started blocking them. Each and every IP that came in bearing trackback spam, spam referer headers, or anything else was no longer going to touch my server. Unfortunate, yes, becase many of the machines which are doing these things have owners who are completely unaware of it. In some cases, the IPs may have been dynamic: there was more than one comcast IP address in there, and I’m pretty sure they don’t give out completely static IP addresses all that often. So, it may be that in blocking this spam, I’ve ended up blocking some legitimate users of my site, and that sucks.

However, I am very tired of deleting spam. I am tired of sorting through crap. I am absolutely tired of people talking the problem to death, because until the people doing these things actually start getting in trouble, nothing at all is going to change. The only way to stop people from spamming, be it email, weblogs or what have you, is to get to the people behind these attempts, and make it unprofitable. Sue them, charge them, whatever, but make it so that if they try and go about it in a way that no one thinks is right, they lose money. Because spammers still make plenty of money on spam. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t keep doing it.

Overnight, I received 90 trackback spams. Approximately 15 of these were new variants on spellings and so on to the point that they made it past my spam moderation filters. As a result, when Iwoke up this morning, I had a major spam problem to deal with. (Luckily for me, it’s my day off work. Unluckily, I’ve been spending most of it fighting spam fires. Annoying, really.)

I’ve turned on comment moderation. All comments must be approved by me. I’m not dealing with this stuff anymore. There is no no way that a spammer can get a comment onto the site and public without me seeing it first. I don’t like it, it’s annoying, and it’s troublesome to comment authors, but it’s worth it to me to be able ot know that no one is going to get a higher search engine ranking because of this site. I’ve started dropping access to any IP address which sends spam. If someone can’t get to my site, hopefully they can email me or something, but I just can’t take the crap that I get anymore. And it’s been helping. Hits to my now-defunct weblog have gone from a major hit count to a few silly aggregators which haven’t adapted yet. The trackback spam flood has slowed down (although not perfectly: I’ve gotten 6 while writing this post.) The message I’m trying to send is pretty simple: I don’t have the money to find you and sue you, but I’ll be damned if my site is going to be a way for your to peddle your wares.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. And I’m taking them.

On the plus side, I did notice a few things yesterday while watching my logs. First, I’ve somehow ended up as the first hit on Google for passive aggressive emo. I think Google heard me shouting, and decided I really meant it. I’m 7th for paris hilton phone hacked – which is amusing, because the post in question doesn’t contain any of the words other than “phone”: it’s a post about RDF toys on the phone. Sounds to me like Google could have used a bit more RDF in its storage mechnism there, seperating spam comments from the actual post content. Metadata would have fixed that bad search result.

I’m going to be looking into a more permanant solution to the problem soon. Right now, I’m passing IP addresses to iptables for dropping: as I said, I’m being a bit of a vigilante about the whole thing. I do want to make it so people can at least navigate the site without problems though, so I will be changing the way this is done around. I just wish it wasn’t neccesary.

For a while, I’ve moaned about the fact that the only decent collaborative editing software was SubEthaEdit, an application which only runs on the OS X platform. I’d discussed with the developers the possibility of releasing even the protocol for the application, so that other tools could interact with it, but no interest was shown in doing so. As a result, I did some small amount of work on the “FortyTwo” project – a play off SubEthaEdit and the Hitchiker’s Guide.

However, a couple days ago I was pointed to something that may soon strike fear into the hearts of the Coding Monkeys: MoonEdit, a Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD application which is free for non-commercial use.

Although it lacks a bit of the glitz and glamour that SEE sports, MoonEdit features a couple things which make it immensely better for collaborative editing of documents:

* History feature, which allows you to roll back to any point in the edit stream, from the first character to the final punctuation mark.
* Full document zoom: simply hit f12 to see a summary view of the whole document, allowing you to easily keep an eye on what’s changing.
* Standalone server mode, allowing you to set up editing of documents on a server easily.
* Macros built into the application.
* Most importantly, Windows support.

Now, collaborative editing is open to the other 97% of the world that doesn’t have a PC. Unfortunately, this app isn’t yet available on the mac platform. I’ve contacted the author, first asking where I can send him money for a donation, and secondly asking if there’s anything I can do to help create a Mac version of the program. With a mac port, it really would become a SEE killer: not as a generalized editor, but as a collaborative one.

To be perfectly honest, I have no idea how this application works. It’s a tiny, static binary – source is not available: me: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1, statically linked, corrupted section header size, total size 129,401 bytes. I didn’t realize things still came that small. However, I can tell you that using this application is extremely cool. What it lacks in polish, it makes up for in usability, both due to wider platform distribution and to the History feature. You can also save documents with full history, allowing you to open them offline and read through the changes that were made.

MoonEdit is the way of the future. If I can get a Mac binary out of the author, I will be an extremely happy camper. If you’re using a mac and want to have a cross platform collaborative editing program, you may want to send an email to the author as well, asking for support; I haven’t gotten a response yet, but given significant motivation (Think $$) most coders will take care of their audience.

One of the biggest things that “irks” me when I’m commenting on some other weblog that I seldom read is that I will most likely never see any response to what I write, even if one is directed at me. For this reason, I often write my own posts, expecting that with Trackback, the original author and subsequent commenters will be able to see my thoughts as well as reply to them.

However, occasionally I don’t want to write a full post, yet I still think that the discussion is worth having. For those times, I really wish that more weblog software packages would support notification of comments, preferably via email. LiveJournal has implemented this since long before I had an account, and the discussion I’ve seen, even on the most minor topics, are gigantic in comparison with the discussions you can find between commenters on most weblogs.

I understand that the cultures are different, and I understand that the goals of each are different, but this is one practice that I definitely miss from my old tools. For that reason, I have installed a wordpress plugin which allows you to ask for subsequent comments to entries to be mailed to you.

I hope that this will allow people, if they desire, to continue threads of conversation longer, and breed more communication between commenters to the site. I certainly know that to me, seeing more talking back and forth among people in comments has always been a great way for issues to be raised that might not seem “Deserving” of a fully thought out response in the form of a new post.

My major concern at this point is with spam: will people who comment find themselves innundated with spam? I hope that I can work with wordpress to keep spam to a minimum, thereby protecting those who receive those emails as well.

The next thing that I’m interested in is threaded comments. However, I’m pretty sure there’s not a “simple” plugin for those, and I do know that threading comments introduces a variety of issues, from display issues to conversion of a tree format to a SQL database. We’ll see. At the moment, I’d like to hear your thoughts on whether allowing people to receive notification of new comments is a good thing or bad thing. Also, since it is new, feel free to let me know how it works in your opinion. You don’t get copies of your own comments at the moment: something I still haven’t decided whether I’m going to change or not.