All posts tagged with "Spam"
Akismet for Guestblock
I'm not sure if anyone else has done this or not, but since my Guestblock started getting ridiculously spammed yesterday (I've only had it about 2 weeks!), I decided to do something about it. The built-in spam protection wasn't working, and blocking IP addresses is about as useful as telling those spammers how naughty they are for leaving their messages all over your site. Tut.
Sooo. After successfully implementing Akismet into my CMS a while ago, I wondered whether I'd be able to do the same for Guestblock (the main site is kind of dead right now). Lo and behold, I have successfully done it.
If anyone is interested in the modification for their guestblocks, let me know. Please note that in order to use the Akismet anti-spam system you must have an account at Wordpress.com.
Woo!
Because I am not a sell out.
As tempting as the idea is, I refuse to be paid to blog. My site is not a tool for anyone - least of all me - to make money; it serves as a creative outlet for me so that I can show off my super-1337 intarwebz sk1llz1!11 because I'm geeky and I simply must have an internet presence.
Do you see any advertising on this site (other than a couple of links to similar sites, but they are all non-profit and generally agree with me on this standpoint)? No. There will never be advertising on this site, and especially not spam disguised as a blog entry. I am not going to lie through my teeth and bore all 2 of my visitors to death by talking about how great it is now that my [begin obligatory link] mortgage debts [/end obligatory link] have been cleared by some scammy company or how I really should be [link!1!1] losing weight [/link] by taking some dodgy pill just to get $5 out of it. I could work a real job (*gasp!* Those actually still exist!1!) and get that in under an hour.
Want to lose all your visitors? Go ahead, sell your site. And your soul. To me, you just look greedy and like you can't be bothered to go out and get a real job.
Spam blogs
Jem wrote an article about this (and a blog entry), and I just had to pick up on it myself since I am seeing more and more of it going on.
Ok so let's say you've just bought your first domain. You've finally moved off free servers full of ads and you can make your site look exactly how you want without being restricted in terms of what you put where so you don't hide your hosts' ads. When I got my first domain, I was so happy to finally be free of adverts, as well as of course having a nice short name instead of somefreehost.com/somewhere/something/me/page.htm.
Right, so, after purchasing your domain, you suddenly notice you can't afford it any more. What to do? Cancel the hosting account and go back to free hosts until you make a bit of a saving? Oh no, you plaster your site with ads. Right. But that's not what annoys me most, I can deal with a couple of adverts here and there (except popups, I can't stand popups). What I find the most annoying these days is this sudden rise in "being paid to blog". Basically you write posts about a given topic, link some company 20985320958 times and you make dollaz. Easy. But say goodbye to your visitors - I won't be coming back to your site if it's full of this sort of thing:
The other day, I went shopping and it was really good! All the shops were really nice and I ended up buying loads of stuff!1!1!
Then I came home and decided we should move! We looked at online realtors and found ourselves the perfect home!
Fabricated blog entries full of keywords meant to up the PageRank of the company you're meant to be plugging. What I don't get is that I've seen countless sites full of these things, and each time there are loads of comments from idiots who obviously can't tell that it's a spam post (an intentionally spammy post, but a spammy post all the same). Gah. And these people who post these things - would they ever read an actual spammy site, i.e. one made by a bot? No, they wouldn't. At least two of the "paid to blog" bloggers I've seen go round actively reporting automated spam blogs. How would they like it if someone did that to them? I can't believe that these people still have visitors. Not one post they make is genuine any more.
/rant
In other news, I seem to have lost SpamAssassin since moving to my new host, so I now get all the spam sent to me delivered to my inbox. :( Before, SA would delete it all for me and I'd have a nice clean inbox to look at with only genuine emails arriving. Thunderbird is doing an excellent job of filtering things when they arrive, but it's annoying that they arrive in the first place. Oh well, at least people can actually get to my site now. I can live with a bit of email spam if it means my site isn't constantly down for people.