JaBbA's Hut

Exit spam is suddenly the issue of the day.

I never looked into the "Top exits" list code on S9y, but it turns out that there was no checking to be sure that the URL presented to exit.php was an actual referenced URL. Some spammers found this out and started hitting blogs with exit spam this weekend.

I woke up today to find 25 exit references to 3 porn sites, and disturbingly, three "portal" sites. They're actually just somewhat cynical attempts to pretend to be a part of the Internet community, but obviously anyone who would use a tactic like this is part of the dark side.

The sites which attacked me (no links here):

macinstruct.net
linuxwaves.net
secureroot.org

I've removed the links, we're temporarily turning off all HREFs in the exits, and we're going to be reviewing that code and rewriting it.

JaBbA says screw 'em.

I've been using the CVS development version of Serendipity on a test server, and it seems pretty solid, so I've updated my blog here to use 0.6.6-CVS. Let me know here if you see anything wierd, or have any comments on the changes. The 0.7-beta should be out in the next 2 weeks.

Some of the features of 0.7:

Multiple Authors
Category Icons
Sub-Categories
Entries may have multiple categories
Lots of new themes

This whole business about referrer SPAM has really become a hot topic.

Ricardo over at Are We There Yet? suggests using Rewrite rules and posts his .htaccess file for use. I previously came up with a method that uses SetEnvIf -- a snippet of my .htaccess file:

SetEnvIf Referer bestiality pornspam
SetEnvIf Referer incest pornspam
SetEnvIf Referer taboo pornspam
SetEnvIf Referer x-stories pornspam
SetEnvIf Referer asstraffic pornspam
SetEnvIf Referer ass-traffic pornspam
SetEnvIf Referer hentai pornspam
SetEnvIf Referer porn pornspam
SetEnvIf Referer djhits pornspam
SetEnvIf Referer drtushy pornspam
SetEnvIf Referer 4444.ws pornspam
SetEnvIf Referer sex pornspam
SetEnvIf Remote_Addr 209.8.161.178 pornspam
deny from env=pornspam

(Gee, this should get me some interesting hits from the search engines

So anyway, which is more efficient? We know, this is only a temporary solution. We will come up with a permanent solution soon.

Meantime, JaBbA says comment here.....

You may notice that the Top Referrers list is gone from my sidebar. I got hit with "Referrer Spam" this week. I've noticed for weeks my hit counts going up with adult sites as referrers, but at first wasn't sure why. They found my blog this week, and now I know why.

The adult sites are trying to increase their "page rank" by having more sites link to them. So they have robots that find weblogs that have automated referrers lists, and then increase the hit count but hitting the page over and over again. Before I turned it off, one incest-taboo.org page had 107 referrer hits in my list.

The dev team is debating how to handle this. I deal with SPAM all day, and at this point I think the only effective way to deal with this is to have the blogger approve referrers. There's some resistance to this on the Dev team. Please comment here...do you agree with me? Or do you think some kind of automated tool would work, and be preferable?

JaBbA says let me hear you...

Update...

I've deleted the porn spammers and put in some blocks to keep them out, so I've reactived my referrers list. However, we're still looking for a real solution - this is only temporary.

I'm on the developer's list for the Serendipity blogging software I am using here. The group has been in a period of heavy activity, and we are just about ready to release S9Y 0.6. The Release Candidate 2 software was installed on this server this morning.

If RC2 looks relatively clean, the plan is to release 0.6 as Gold on Saturday 5/1. If you see anything funky, put a comment on this thread, and I'll forward those comments to the development team.

0.7 is already in heavy development, and the release of 0.6 will mean that all the developers can turn their attention to the 0.7 development tasks.

0.5 was released in February, the changes to 0.6 are huge, including:

-- Shared code library support (This blog and the Librarian's Rant share the same code base)

-- Image information moved to database

-- Imroved administrative back-end usability

-- Event plugins (blogroll pinging, email notification, etc...)

-- HTML validators

-- Many new plugins, including textile support

The biggest change for 0.7 will be the addition of multi-user support. There will be author, editor and superuser roles available.

Well, Got someone else trying Serendipity - Jim Drash, a friend of mine.

Nothing's there yet, but this is a Shout Out/Track back for him!

Because I've been working on the middleware for this site. Some months ago I completely rewrote the backend to allow me to secure certain applications for Friends and Family. Then I installed and rewrote some blogging software I could integrate into my site.

I've gotten some feedback, and the #1 feedback has been "We'd like to give you feedback, where are the comments?"

So I've been trying out a few things and have finally installed Serendipity as my new blogging software. It's PHP based and the main reason I chose it is the 'embed' option, allowing me to use it's full functionality, have it integrate with my site, and not have to rip apart the code!

Let me know what you think, I'm still working on the look and feel.

A new problem with spammers is appearing - BlogSpam.