Trackback spam

Oh. My. Goodness. Everyone else had been talking about it, but thus far my part of the world had remained relatively unaffected by it all — until this morning. I woke up at around 6, got up, checked my email, and (so I thought) my blog comments, before going back to sleep and waking again around 9ish. At which point I was greeted with in excess of 40 trackback spam comments, most (all? Does WP apply filters to trackbacks? These were pretty blatant — sex, incest, bestiality — all plainly spelt for my filters to supposedly recognise — but still got through) of which were displayed on various pages of the blog.

Damn.

I very nearly disabled ping/trackbacks as a knee-jerk response to the whole thing, but didn’t. What the hell do spammers aim to gain by doing this!? In the case of blog-spam, especially! DO YOU SEE MY REACTION?! I’M NOT CLICKING YOUR LINKS TO SEE PICTURES OF INCEST AND BESTIALITY! I’M CONSIDERING CLOSING OTHERWISE LEGITIMATE AVENUES OF COMMUNICATION JUST TO SEE YOU FAIL.

Let’s all have a round of applause for their search engine optimisation techniques. Not. It’s not even a direct inbound link, which means it carries less weight with search engines anyway! Considering you appear to be flaunting all kinds of filter systems, at least take advantage of it and do it properly! Morons. And, you know what? I care enough that next time I get hit, I’ll take the time to remove all the comment spam over again. If a search engine spiders me in that moment, your rank increases, right up until it spiders me again and it’s all removed. Dare I say it, designing porn sites with ALT text and semantics in mind for the ultimate “blind user” is actually more intelligent than their currrent spamming methods.

Realise something: Your trackbacks are utterly unfiltered at this point in time. WordPress is open source, free-as-in-beer (porn?) software. Anyone who had a shred of IT knowledge and 20 minutes could tell you that the trackbacks would get through. Further, they would tell you that direct links weigh higher than indirect content links from external pages in terms of SEO. And yet the trackbacks are nothing more than strings of words, with the ONLY link being an originating location link (for the trackback) — I’m NOT saying the entire content should be wrapped in an a tag — I’m saying the content itself is utterly not what it should be. Contrary to popular belief, even spammers and porn networks should be capable of competently constructing brief messages using correct sentence structure and the like, whilst keeping a maximum of keywords intact. Why am I saying this? I couldn’t clearly explain. I’m angry, and the only way I can (rationally) vent is by demonstrating (technically, ignoring all moral or other issues) what they’re doing wrong, and how this makes them ignorant pigs. Yes, I’d rather use stronger language. No, I’m not going to.

As a matter of defiance, please, if you’ve read this post and hold similar views on the subject, send me a trackback. Just to show there’s legitimate use for it, and it needn’t be disqualified because of the criminal acts of spammers. And, if you know of any (vigilante or not) campaigns in the works similar to Make Love Not Spam, let me know. Please.

I’ve disabled commenting for this post to encourage people to use track- and ping-backs. Having said that, if you have something to say and don’t have a blog or access to ping/trackback facilities, head over to the Contact page and drop me a line with what you want to say, and we’ll figure out a way to get it posted.

On Smart cars

swylie:

no, that’s the smart car approach

Josh:

hehehehe

Josh:

nah

swylie:

they have replacable plastic panels on the outside of the car, so you can click on a different colour, or replace them when you run into stuff in your stupidly small car that it would fit anyware

Josh:

that’s *BANG* “Oh, the driver’s dead… but the environment is okay! And the car came out of a Kinder Suprise, so we’ll just buy another one!”

No, really, I’m here

Again. Promise I’m not about to scurry away. Damn it, believe me!

Anyway, to make up for the distinct lack of content this place has been suffering from (although the hits don’t suffer, thanks to search engines and previous relevant content regarding MP3 players, the set of A Doll’s House, and miscellaneous other things…), here’s a list of what I’ve been reading over the last week or two. If you can’t read the titles on the cover images, hold your mouse over and text will appear. Clicking images takes you to the relevant Amazon.com product page (great for reviews that I’m too lazy to type now…). I’ve got more to say on some of these books, but can’t be bothered typing right about now.

A snippet of thought regarding a problem.

Scanning is dealt with. Finis. Problem resolved, utterly. Cross-platform happiness — remote access, even! Printing likewise. What’s left? The biggest issue of all… possibly. Depends on what pretty GUI tools and the like exist, I suppose… learning new systems in small timeframes is never really fun, but the learning curve shouldn’t be too dangerous. A few thousand dollar dangerous. Paperweight dangerous. Hardly! The paperweight wouldn’t be heavy enough to hold down paper! Ah, breadbox computing.

If this post makes no sense whatsoever to you, good. That was my intention. It’d be no fun letting the cat out of the bag before I had lots of cute pictures of the cat to show you all… so there’s a wait, until I get all this up and running, then I can start my geek boasting. No, this post is mostly about links. Smart cookies will likely have a moderately good idea what’s cooking, if they think about it, but the project should still hold a degree of excitement (hey, I know exactly what’s going on, I’m as excited as anyone!). In the (at this point) highly unlikely event that the whole concept falls apart horrendously, that will likewise be communicated in the fullness of time, along with the original intended idea and proposed course of action. Having said that, I plan to spend at least part of tomorrow morning organising hardware…

Search and display problem fixed

Dale was searching for some RSS stuff on this site, and discovered that he was only getting seven results (the same number as my default display for the front page) — and that the same problem existed with the month archive display. He thinks it used to work just fine, and I had thought it did, too, but I’m not really sure what I changed to break it. So, in a dodgy-ish patch, I’ve added next/previous page links to the bottom of each page. This works on search results, as well as monthly archives and the front page.

The code I’m using for these page links, just in case anyone’s interested, is as follow (obviously the CSS/formatting stuff is optional):

<p style="margin:10px;background:#D3D3D3;color:#404040;"><?php posts_nav_link(' ', __('<span style="float:left">&laquo; Previous Page</span>'), __('<span style="float:right">Next Page &raquo;</span>')); ?></p>

The essential PHP stuff only is:

<?php posts_nav_link(' ', __('&laquo; Previous Page'), __('Next Page &raquo;')); ?>

Hope this makes life easier!

This is for the WordPress blogging system, and is used to add next and previous page links to the end of a document. Further information can be found on the WordPress wiki, on the article entitled “Template Tags“.