__/ [John Bokma] on Saturday 31 December 2005 18:06 \__
> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> __/ [John Bokma] on Saturday 31 December 2005 17:07 \__
>>
>>> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>
>>>> That's never an ideal solution. However, leeches can really raise
>>>> the hosting bills, so when thresholds are approached, it's worth
>>>> cutting down where it hurts the least -- HotLinking. Some of them
>>>> would grab a 200KB JPEG and use it as their background picture. Pure
>>>> HotLinking. If it's just one site, updating the blacklists is easy.
>>>> It becomes impractical when this happens too often.
>>>
>>> A lot comes via myspace, blogspot, so just a few rules works miracles
>>> :-D. (At least in my case).
>>
>> Some of them link to an actual page, but HotLink at the same time to
>> give a flavour of the content therein.
>
> Yes, I have a few of those. And I do allow them to do that. Also, some
> time ago someone did hotlink, and I told that a link would be nice, and
> got one. One blog that did this image hot linking give me many, many
> visitors.
>
>> There's little to be lost,
>> but it's still something... I am very paranoid about blacklisting,
>> thinking that I would drive away genuine visitors.
>
> Yes, you might when you blacklist a blog that has an image hotlinked and
> a link to you.
>
>> Yesterday I blacklisted a single (fortunately static, no proxies
>> either) IP address of a Polish person who posted over 100 comment
>> spam per day. 2 days of that pattern were enough to encourage action,
>> but I can assure you that my Palm will remind me to lift that ban
>> shortly. Too many rules lead to chaos.
>
> Yes true. I probably would have looked up the abuse address of the ISP,
> and contacted him/her. Also a lot of comment spam can be killed, is my
> experience, by a simple check on the length of the message. Also not
> allowing HTML (i.e. reporting a warning) does help. I am not that
> desperate that I want each and every comment.
>
> I have been wondering for some time how much effect the swapping of the
> names of two fields have (for example call email url and vice versa). In
> the form itself this is not visible, but in the program I might get urls
> in the url field :-D
Have a look at Akismet. It's a new service . I had the honour of being
part of its test set. The prominence and extent of that service could
match the growth of Ping-o-matic (about half a billion pings), which is
another site that feeds on WordPress built-in (preinstalled rather) func-
tionality.
Matt would appreciate a Perl wrapper that takes advantage of that simple
API. It might get you a lot of popularity (traffic) too. Other developers
listed below are authoritarian figures in their domain.
http://akismet.com/development/
Akismet is quite closely-integrated with WordPress 2.0 (A CMS/blogging
tool), which was officially released /today/. Its previous version had no
less than 900,000 downloads.
You can use it for personal purposes and discuss an implementation at:
http://lists.automattic.com/mailman/listinfo/spam-stopper
Seriously, it's a good opportunity not only to stop spam, but also be put
your name down on the Perl wrapper, get a PR7 link, as well as many loyal
users. It'll be an easy job for you due to 'Perl fluency'.
Roy
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