No Refer Spam

In: , , On: 2005 / 02 / 05 Short URL: http://ozh.in/4b

Refer SpamI have been hit quite bad by referer spammers these last few days, with peaks at one hit every 2 seconds (bots loading pages of my site with a fake referer in order to make someone click on their site, have a look at this refer spam screenshot)

It's not like I really care : I don't display publicly my referers and I'm not dumb enough to click on their links, so they are not earning a single click from my site. Plus, I'm bandwith unmetered and uncapped on a fat 100 Mbits, so their bot loading pages is not a real problem. It's just that I'd rather be slashdotted than refer-spam-hammered :)

So I wrote a simple anti refer spam script, sending back the spammers to their own site.

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I pay attention to taglines, and like to read funny or sensible ones. Asterisk, famous design blog, used to have one of my favorites, “Pretentious tagline goes here“. And today, I noticed they changed it, to a sadly common, meaningless and not funny “Where web design lives” … Sucks. (1) «

WordPress Plugin : Auto Moderate Comments

In: , , , , On: 2005 / 02 / 02 Short URL: http://ozh.in/49
When I wrote this plugin, in early 2005, spam fighting was harsh, time consuming and painful. A few months later came the almighty Akismet. Until further notice, I consider this plugin deprecated.

A lot of people tend to close comments when a post gets old, either to avoid comments on old topics, or to avoid spam (since link spammers randomly target old posts). I think it is a bad habit, since it's very frustrating for a late visitor not to be able to write a comment, or ask a question, especially when the post has a "technical" flavor (about code or software, for example). Plus, plugins auto closing comments do it regardless of the activity on a post : there can be a discussion going on, but suddenly, because the post was written 15 days ago, discussion is shut off. Kind of rude.

I think it would be better to auto moderate, not close, old posts. I also think it would be smarter to consider activity on a thread, i.e. date of last comment if applicable, or modification, rather than the date it was written.

So I wrote a WordPress plugin : Auto Moderate Comments

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Anti spam tag rel=”nofollow” : useless.

In: , , , , , On: 2005 / 01 / 31 Short URL: http://ozh.in/48

A few days ago, Google introduced a new tag supposed to combat comment spam : adding rel="nofollow" to a link will prevent Googlebot from following it, and thus from giving the linked site any Page Ranking credit.

The idea behind this is : spammers are spamming to get higher Page Ranking from spammed blogs, this tag will prevent any PR increase, so spammers will soon stop spamming. Welcome in utopia.

Spammers are spamming because posting a million comments costs nothing, and still can generate a few clicks on their sites. So why the hell should they stop spamming ? They just won't.

Sheep Films: some dude having fun alone in front of his camera… and making some pretty good things :) (0) «
Wow…. Most impressive thing of the month : Flickr Central – Experimental Color Picker. Pick a color, this tool will select pictures of a similar color field, from Flickr (an amazingly featured online gallery with a few awesome ideas like this emerging from its very active community). Awesome. (0) «
THE ULTIMATE CALVIN and HOBBES SNOWMAN TRIBUTE. I love Calvin & Hobbes. This guy loves them too :) Merci à Axel for the link. (2) «

Autostitch : Make Panoramas Automagically

In: , , On: 2005 / 01 / 25 Short URL: http://ozh.in/44

I like to make panoramas from several pictures. Well ok, I made only one as of today, but I have a lot to do for my upcoming album, trip to the USA during last may :P

And on this topic, I just found an amazing piece of software : Autostitch, which in one mouse click gathers several pictures into one panorama, correctly handling distortions and light changes. No matter the order of your pictures. From left to right. Clockwise. Demonstration …

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Remove Invalid Characters in UTF-8

In: , , , On: 2005 / 01 / 25 Short URL: http://ozh.in/43

Via How to get rid of invalid UTF-8 characters: to remove them, for example after aggregating del.icio.us or rss feeds, simply use this trick :

< View plain text >
php

  1. $text = iconv("UTF-8","UTF-8//IGNORE",$text);

Quake3 WebRCON : Web Based RCON Interface

In: , , , On: 2005 / 01 / 22 Short URL: http://ozh.in/42

I wrote a PHP interface to send remote console (rcon) commands to a Quake3 server. It has about all the features a server admin should need, all packed in a compact interface. Read more for a detailed list of features, or see the demo.

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