July 1, 2003
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Comment Spam and other blog matters
I'm suddenly getting a significant amount of "comment spam" consisting of nonsense comments in Spanish and English with the "homepage" url filled with some promotional site. They are a pain to delete.
Virtually all of them were posted from IP Address 207.88.76.143, which resolves as follows: "207.88.76.143.ptr.us.xo.net ". www.xo.net is "XO Communications" who will receive a complaint.
I worry that once I ban this IP, more will sprout up. Anybody else having this problem?
As long as we're on blog technology matters, I've been ruminating on a few questions:
1. I can't get anything out of hit counters anymore. Trackback is much more useful. Does anybody understand the Trackback ping well enough to know if I could create a trackback hyperlink so non-MT users could create the ping (similarly, when I use Bloggar to compose a post, can I simulate the ping?)
2. I'd like to use PHP in the individual archives, but I don't want to screw up all the permalinks out there by changing extensions from .html to .php. Can a blanket redirect be created in the htaccess file that would only apply to archive urls (not images, etc.)?
3. One of the reasons I'd like to use PHP in the individual archives is to show recent refers to that page. That would, essentially, simulate Trackback for users. The only way I can think of doing this is writing the refers to a companion file each time the page is loaded and then adding a hyperlink in the archive template to the companion file ("<$MTEntryNumber>.inc" or something). Is there a more elegant solution?
In the alternative, I could use something other than PHP, but I think more people will be turning off javascript and server-side is the way to go. Besides, I've done some PHP.
If you've already conquered these issues I'd be interested in hearing from you.
Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at July 1, 2003 9:52 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksI'm not sure if this is what you're asking, but Whizbang has a stand-alone trackback pinger. Anybody can trackback, as long as you provide the URL and the server to receive the ping.
As for the rest, I'm sorry I can't answer right now. My analgesics are narcotic and soporific, and I'm already fading into la-la land.
There's a standalone trackback pinger here
http://kalsey.com/tools/trackback/
which will allow Blogger users (and anyone else) to ping Trackback links.
I'm facing the same issue about redirecting the .html files to .php, but I don't know enough about .htaccess at this point. Right now, I just have two versions of all the posts I made before I switched to .php, but I'd like to delete all those .html files and free up some space.
As for referrals, I'm not a programmer, and all I can do when it comes to scripting is incorporate into my site the things that kind people like Charles Johnson make for people like me. I'm pretty sure that his referral script requires the individual file for each instance that you use it, which would indeed get very inelegant after just a few pages. However, I have seen sites that have had instances of the Extreme Stats counter (which I believe tracks referals among other things) on every page, but I've got no idea if it's a better or worse solution (and it broke things when I tried using it some time back).
Wrt your second point, you can use .htaccess to have PHP process files ending in ".html":
AddType application/x-httpd-php .html
I'm not familiar with the inner workings of MT, but adding this to an .htaccess should tell Apache to send pages ending in .html to the PHP parser:
AddType application/x-httpd-php .html
Personally, I've got a script in the individual archive template that shows on each individual entry where people came in from - here's the script (I use the same script at the bottom of the main page) - here's how it looks:
For #2, look into mod_rewrite. Something like:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(/blog/archives/\d+).html$ $1.php [R=301,L]
should work great.
Your problem with XO probably stems from some small ISP they bought. Every so often, when I still checked most of my spam, I'd get floods of it from XO, which would then dry up. My best guess is that they buy aan ISP or other small network, and in the process of integrating it, leave a couple of big security holes with their name on them for a few days to weeks.
How appropriate - spam comments to a spam article...
I'm facing the same issue about redirecting the .html files to .php, but I don't know enough about .htaccess at this point. Right now, I just have two versions of all the posts I made before I switched to .php, but I'd like to delete all those .html files and free up some space.
Comments are Closed.