Viraj's Weblog

Just got my own Jotspot wiki. All I put up there so far are some pictures, but it's very cool!

I've been getting alot of spam comments being posted to this particular blog entry of mine. I always wondered why. I mean, it's a really lame blog entry.

Then I found out what the first link on Google Images was when you search for smiley evolution. No idea why someone would search for this.. but there ya go.

Today I decided to implement captchas on my blog. I dug around and found a neat PHP captcha class called hn_captcha. After a few hours of hacking on the b2evolution code I think I have it integrated pretty well.

It defaulted to using some Microsoft Word fonts which I didn't have (I don't remember when I last used a PC). As a replacement, I used Gentium, the free open source font recently released.

I've removed some restrictions on comments now, and now it's just wait and see how much spam I get. Judging from the previous spams, I cannot tell for sure if they are bot-based. Or at least they are trying to hide this. I have been logging the user agent for the spam posts and the last time 8 spams came in at about the same time, but their user agents looked like:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)
Opera/6.01 (Windows 98; U) [en]
Opera/6.04 (Windows XP; U) [en]
Opera/7.02 Bork-edition (Windows NT 5.0; U) [en]
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98; QXW0332q)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 95; USA On-Site)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; MSN 2.6; Windows 95; Gateway2000)

The first 5 spams came in at the exact same time (to the second). The next 2 came within 2 minutes later. Are these botnets? If so, why the different user agents? The fact that they all came in within a small time frame says to me they are botnets. The spams that came in are pretty much useless since I was blocking URLs in comments. It's like they are testing botnets on my blog.

I think I first heard about Reddit from a Paul Graham article mentioning to leave comments 'via Reddit'. I've been using it ever since. I think it's one of the coolest sites out there, plus it is written in Python .

This interview describes what the site does. I couldn't agree more with this comment:

As a couple of information junkies, Steve and I found ourselves with too many rss feeds and too many tabbed windows open every morning -- we wanted a front page we could go to every morning that was made for us. Del.icio.us/popular was definitely an inspiration, because it showed the potential of aggregation (I think I'm supposed to be calling this the Wisdom of Crowds), but we were after links that were more ephemeral than the reference material one usually bookmarks on del.icio.us.

You can think of it as first aggregating the most highly-rated links for the day, and second being able to learn what you like to read and tailoring the results for you. I've found some great material just by watching the top-rated links, which they provide an RSS feed for.

Well now I'm getting trackback spam, so I'm disabling trackbacks...

Well this weekend I was bombarded with blog spam. It all came from dozens of IPs with random text in the comment like "interesting blog" and what not. What's interesting is the URLs they put in their spam point to other blogs, so I don't know what they are doing.

Anyhow, I'm pretty fed up with it and now I'm not allowing any URLs at all in comments, sorry. You'll have to clear the Url field on any comment posts as well.