Posted on: August 7th, 2010 by Famous Phil

This is more an update than anything else.  I have finally taken the time to prune some of the comments in the past year on FamousPhil.  In the future, I will be only approving links that either are track backs or contain non SEO titles.  I have never minded allowing comments, but the spam volume that I’ve begun seeing is just too unreasonable to continue handling without changing my policies. In the past, I’ve approved comments that contain text that pertains to the post, but I just can’t continue on that course

In the next week or so, I will also be disabling user registrations, along with pruning the user database (except to the guest posters who were asked to make an account).  That too has gotten out of hand!

As always, if you want to make a guest post and get a real link back with seo key words, feel free to contact me   I generally don’t mind the content as long as it has something useful in it that won’t harm my readers.

Tags: policy update, spam
Posted in My Site
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Posted on: May 3rd, 2009 by Famous Phil

Anymore, it seems that at least once a week spam gets on my nerves and I end up researching ways to block it more effectively without blocking legitimate messages.

For instance, the other day, I noticed a huge influx of email spam to “phil@saveourshows.org” and I went into that account and increased the spam filter a touch more.  This quite often brings up a very legitimate problem for me, that is, what happens when someone legitimate tries to send me an email?   Everytime I notice spam on accounts that is heavier than usual, I usually end up bumping the spam filter up a little more, and to be perfectly honest, that spam filter can’t go much higher!  Sure, I do recommend that if I don’t respond within a few hours, try sending email to another one of my many addresses, but what happens when that someone finds my address on one of these sites by googling?  They will potentially not get a response from me and not realize that I have so many email addresses.

I could go on about email spam, but that isn’t my main focus, comment spam is!  I installed wordpress sometime back in January (don’t ask me when lol) when I was redesigning my site (which needs a lot of improvements still).  Back in January and even into February, I didn’t really blog much (mostly because I didn’t feel like it), and this site got so little traffic that no spammer would consider hitting it.  Actually, this was the case until my blog on WHM / CPanel came out.  For some reason, I rank really high with terms like “cpanel advantages and disadvantages”.  I also began blogging about technical topics, which drive traffic to my site because it is generally unique content that most system admins are looking for (but usually can’t find).  That is great for my site’s traffic, but not really great for my current spam fighting techniques (for my blog, these have been me manually deleting spam).

I am now getting on average: 30 spam comments a day.  Being a human that makes mistakes, I sometimes hit delete on legitimate comments by accident because it gets to a point where legit comments look like spam too lol.  Unfortunately, I have to let the legit comments get deleted after this because there is no backup copy of these comments.  Anyways, long story short, I’m sick of the spam.

Solution: I used the google approach (as usual).  I found this wonderful blog here.  My default install of WordPress did have Akismet installed (but not activated) exactly like this blog said.  I installed it, got an API key from WordPress and now I should get no more spam, or minimal spam.  I will say that I am getting no more spam that isn’t easy to delete.  It no longer takes as much brain power from me to think about what is spam and isn’t spam.  Hopefully this plugin will keep the spam away for a long time before I need something more powerful.

Personally, I recommend this plugin for WordPress.  It has saved me time in the past week of having this installed and I’m sure that it will save me much more time to come.

Tags: akismet, blog, comment, comment spam, spam, wordpress
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, My Site
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Posted on: April 20th, 2009 by Famous Phil

So today I was reading through my comments to approve and disapprove suggestions / comments on blogs.  I usually get about 30 to 40 spam comments a week that I have to manually delete.  This time I got a funny spam comment that I thought deserves its own blog (no I didn’t approve it, rather, I promoted it!).  Just to be an “ass”, I thought I would also post this user’s IP address and email publically.  You may feel free to spam him

So here is the comment to a blog “Google features and what I utilize from Google“,

User: Afforsenerede
email: aninuebit@gmail.com
ip: 209.239.112.48
submitted on 2009/04/19 at 11:20am:

“Yooo..

I kno it has nothing to do with what you wrote, but have you ever heard of http://www.bluestickers.info/ringtones.php . They seems to promise free ringtones

PS. Dont be an ass, this is NOT spam ”

Why did I post this although it only deserved a deletion?  It is quite simple, I get enough spam email a day to know that when I post my email on a public site that is quite popular, I will get more spam to that address. My goal is to get this spammer a lot more spam to hopefully overwhelm him to where he has to increase his spam filter and possibly start flagging legitimate email as spam.

To get around spam, I implement a system to where my emails are filtered at the address level then forwarded on through more filters on other servers before being forwarded to a central email address that I have set up.  My central email address is not filtered because I rely on email to be filtered before it gets to my central email account.  This way if I notice a high volume of spam, I can simply increase the filtering on public addresses and start deleting legitimate email without too much worry.  People who know me probably know one of my lightly filtered addresses and can send the same email to multiple addresses to ensure delivery.

If the above confuses you, I simply have a bunch of public email addresses that I filter then forward to an unfiltered address that I look at email from.  Spam doesn’t bother me much anymore, especially since I use a text email client that doesn’t show pictures and makes deleting a message as easy as the “d” key (this is called pine).  Deleting 100 spam messages takes me about 1 minute now compared to about 5 minutes with a web based client like gmail or yahoo mail or hotmail.

Pine is a great program and all of my hosting clients may use pine on my server through ssh, I have compiled pine with password file support (.pinepass).  Pine is a bit tricky to set up, but I posted a little bit about the process on adminreference.

Finally, I would like to thank this spammer that goes by the name: Afforsenerede for getting me on this topic.  I will have a reply out to you soon   I also intentionally removed the link to that info site just to be a bastard .

Tags: email, pine, smart, spam
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Technology
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