Will and Beyond - Posts tagged will and beyond

04/19/09 @ 2:03PM EST
posted by will

spam

Most comment spam I get is just for porn and pharmaceuticals, but sometimes there are entertaining bits of text attached with them to try and fool my spam filter.

Some spammers are weird
That makes it entertaining
Those crazy Russians

Godspeed.

[Comments: 6][Tags: will and beyond]

Will and Beyond code revamped

03/21/09 @ 8:45PM EST
posted by will

rubik

I have gradually coded all of Will and Beyond in bits and pieces. As I learned new stuff, I worked it into the code, and as I thought of new features, I worked them in. It did the job, but if you were to stand back and look at the code, it was a mess.

After giving it some thought, I decided to spend the last couple weeks going through all of the code, line by line. Redundancies were eliminated, processes were optimized, and features were enhanced.

If you were to look in on the backend, things would appear sleeker, easier, and overall drastically better. -Oh rrly??? -Lord Cronos

[Comments: 2][Tags: will and beyond]

Oodles of Comment Spam

11/03/08 @ 11:41AM EST
posted by will

I still haven't dealt with the comment problem I'm having. I'll get to that this week hopefully. In the meantime, I've just been dealing with everything manually.

In about 84 hours, Will and Beyond received 688 comments. One of them was actually not spam, and I caught that one. What types of comments are these? Here's a Wordle of their content:

Uploaded file

Look at all the spam
Anything 'stand out' to you?
Wow, I'm so mature

Godspeed.

[Comments: 2][Tags: will and beyond]

Spam Versus Comments

10/22/08 @ 12:19AM EST
posted by will

Some of you might have noticed that commenting on my posts has been a little screwy recently; allow me to explain.

Prior, my system worked well; it works as follows. A comment is posted by someone, and it appears instantly. It then appears on my control panel, and I can flag it to keep or delete. Once I manually approve the comment, that's when any notifications go through. Or, I can add a spam string to my list of filters. When I do this, I add a string such as one of the following:

dreaminteen.com
dreamkoska.com
e-junkie.com
easymedics.com
email invitation virus
escortrussia.info
ezo.drzp.org
files.lartrk.webnode.com
find cheap hotel
floridaforeclosureassistance.com
forex.blogquarters.com
free blonde video clip
free gay asian porn

(Hmm I wonder how many visitors will arrive due to those search terms appearing on this page...)

Uploaded file

Then, all comments which haven't been flagged as approved, as well as all comments posted in the future are scanned against my list of spam strings. If a comment finds a match it's automatically deleted.

At some point, something went wrong, and all posts were being marked as spam and were being deleted. I've temporarily disabled spam filtering, but this requires going through hundreds of spam comments a day, checking if any real comments have been posted. This is tedious, and usually disappointing, since not many comments are really posted.

As a result, I need to revamp the system. My plan to improve the system involves three steps:

1) I'll rewrite the code which checks for string matches. I'm not sure what went wrong, but I'll take another stab at it.

2) Instead of having comments be deleted, I'll have them flagged as spam; they won't appear on the site, but they'll still be in my database 'til I approve their deletion.

3) Once I approve a comment, the email address of that commenter will be logged, and any future comments posted with that email address will be approved, and won't be subject to the spam filter.

Uploaded file

I'll get to that sometime, maybe this week, maybe not. If anyone has any other suggestions for developing this system, let me know. And nobody dare suggest using captchas; I hate Captchas.

Photo: Flickr
Photo: Flickr

PHP is fun
But comment spam is not fun
Let the fight begin

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0][Tags: will and beyond]

More Guest Posts

08/13/08 @ 11:38AM EST
posted by will

I mentioned previously that I was going to being running some guest posts, where I swap a weekly post with some other site. Richard from Table Salt Games has now written two posts here on Will and Beyond, as I have on his site, here and here.

Uploaded file

The newest addition to this lineup is Jeff from Battlemouth. Richard has been posting on Fridays, and you can expect to see Jeff's posts on Sundays. I put up my first post at Battlemouth today, Unifying Blog Participation. I'm still up for doing more post swapping; if anyone's interested, contact me.

Godspeed.

[Tags: will and beyond]

About Will and Beyond and Statistics

08/04/08 @ 10:20PM EST
posted by will

I came across an article posted on ProBlogger, and I decided to rewrite my about page. I didn't change the picture, which I'll do at some point, but I rewrote all the text from scratch.

Uploaded file

I'm particularly proud of the statistics section. You can see a snapshot of what it looked like when I posted this, but those are dynamic numbers, so they will change over time.

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0][Tags: will and beyond]

Guest Posts

08/01/08 @ 12:13PM EST
posted by will

I setup an arrangement with Richard from Table Salt Games to have us trade posts once a week; he'll post here and I'll post there. I made my first post this morning, R.I.P. Scrabulous.

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Trading posts seems to me to the be the most beneficial way of doing guest posts, for both parties. In addition to increasing the amount of backlinks, you also expose a new site to your content and writing style. In respect to dealing with guest posts, it seems to me that having posts about subjects far and wide is advantageous here on Will and Beyond. This allows me to accept pretty much any type of guest post, but since I don't specialize in writing on one specific topic, it also allows me to write about whatever the other site wants, without it being any trouble.

Uploaded file

Our arrangement is pretty simple; he runs a site about gaming, so he's going to be making gaming posts here, and since I already writing posts about games, it's easy for me to make a post over there, that I might have just made here anyway.

If anyone is interested in swapping posts, let me know and we can try and work something out.

Photo: Flickr

Godspeed.

[Tags: will and beyond]

Google vs. Cuil: The Definitive Comparison

07/28/08 @ 4:15PM EST
posted by will

There's a very simple way to determine which is a better search engine. Let's Google for "will and beyond" (without quotes).

Uploaded file

Hmm, it comes up as the first result! That's a good sign. Now let's Cuil (that's not a verb yet...) "will and beyond". (Again, without quotes.)

Uploaded file

Why didn't I show the screenshot of the results? Oh, because, I don't show up within the first 15 pages. In fact, Bed Bath & Beyond (one of the places I plagiarized from) didn't even show up 'til page 13. I refuse to go past page 15, because of how much I have to refresh due to the error messages coming up due to high server load.

Let's try "will and beyond" with quotes. The same results... quotes seem to have no effect.

Winner: Google

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0][Tags: ranting, technology, will and beyond]