Spam–the mosquitoes of the Internet. Since I planted my new site on some fresh soil, it has become almost a part-time job for me to try and contain the build-up of Spam from overrunning my site. Every new comment, that has something to do with Texas Holdem, or Poker, or Viagra, or that may contain a slew of links, all to sites that serve no purpose other than surreptitiously installing spy-ware on some unsuspecting victim (who is not using Firefox), and flood their computer screen with a dozen pop-up advertisements for things no one has an interest of purchasing– it has me seething at the teeth.
There are two people I would like to meet in the Spam Market. First, the filthy hoodlums that write the life-giving code behind Spam. Second, the idiots that are actually purchasing this stuff. I imagine they exist? I mean, if spammers weren’t reeling in a few pigeons for all their efforts, would they even bother?
Spam comments used to be a HUGE HUGE problem for me, it was horrible. I’d go into Movable Type and come to find that 317 of my 325 commenters were spammers. In any case, when I switched back to Pixel Deep, I made sure to install MT-Blacklist. It’s a filter that stops all my spam before it hits, and it works very well. I know you’re using WordPress, and I’m not familiar with its spam-stopping abilities, but if it becomes a recurring, endless problem, consider Movable Type and its Blacklist extension – I love it.
Anyway, really nice redesign, the RSS feed is KEY!
Spaminator:
http://dev.wp-plugins.org/file/spaminator/trunk/kittens-spaminator.php?rev=174
It’s working like a charm so far.
The killer is Spam is nearly pure profit. If one idiot in a million buys something, spammers make money.
They write viruses to turn PCs into zombies. They don’t even have to pay for bandwidth. And if the comptuer gets cleaned up there is always another PC user with no patches or firewalls clicking on whatever comes their way.
BTW, I set up my laptop on an XP / Fedora dual boot. Its very sweet. And after beating on it for a while I got ndiswrapper to get my wireless connection up.
Good point, there really is no overhead for spam.
Ndiswrapper is the way to go, especially for PCMCIA wifi cards–glad you got that working. Did you know Fedore Core 3 came out? I think it has better ACPI support for power management (although I’m still having trouble getting my laptop to hibernate or suspend).
Yup, I’m running Fedora Core 3 right now. My only complaint about Ndiswrapper is it was a total pain to get working the first time around. Fedora doesn’t like wlan0 so you have to alias it to eth1 if you want to use the GUI tools. And when I set it up I had forgotten that my access point broadcasts on channel 6 and the default configuration is channel 1. It took me a while to figure out all that.