Please sir, can I have more?

A poor urchin goes up to the headmaster, “Please sir, can I have more comments?”
The headmaster looks down from his perch and with a grimace says, “Not before you show me your cookie!”

Well, the poor lad never did get any more comments. He didn’t have the right cookie, but you can. Just grab my Cookies For Comments plugin and anyone who leaves a comment on your blog will need the correct cookie. That will stop quite a bit of comment spam dead in it’s tracks.

It’s the first release and fairly simplistic, but it should give some comment spammers a headache for at least 10 minutes. It’s about time they upgraded their spamming tools anyway. According to my log file, it had stopped over 18,600 spam comments in the last week or so. The rest got handed to Akismet and it stopped several thousand more. They’ve been busy haven’t they?

So, should you use this instead of Akismet? Not a chance. This will only stop the brain dead comment spammers who use automated bots to post to the comment form. Trackback and pingback spam and spammers who either use poorly paid human slaves or browser based user agents will defeat this.

If you use a caching plugin such as WP Super Cache make sure you clear the cache after enabling this plugin. Also, I’m not sure what will happen with those plugins that merge CSS files together.

Thanks Dan for the idea!

Paul Walsh is a true woman

Go chat with him in Oslo. Better than all that reality tv stuff!

Oh, this is good, if the web business doesn’t work out Paul should consider reality tv. He’s here now. He has possibly missed his flight because his laptop time is on UK time. He’s number 4 in the queue with the airline. Good luck Paul!

Edit: check Paul’s Twitter for further updates. The video is here now!

On Tuesday I join the Bebo Generation at BlogTalk

Sigh. The local free newspaper, The Cork Independent, covered BlogTalk 2008 here in Cork and lead with the headline, “Bebo Generation descend on Cork”. Bebo? *mutter* *mutter*

Anyway, I’ll be sitting on a panel titled, From blog-style commentary to conversational social media which pretty much spans the entire blogging and social media experiences. On the panel with me will be Stephanie Booth who I have conversed with a few times on IRC but never met, Bernie Goldbach who I have met a number of times and always has something interesting to say, and finally, Jan Schmidt who I had never heard of but his bio suggests someone who will know a lot about the topic of social media!

How do I feel about the current crop of social media sites? I quit Facebook! Well, no I didn’t, but I will, soon!

Three killed at Dunboy Castle

Three young men were killed today when their car fell into the water at Dunboy Castle just outside Castletownbere in Co Cork.

Investigating gardaí say that the three local young men had been driving in the grounds of Dunboy Castle when their Ford Fiesta got stuck in grass close to a laneway below the castle which is currently being renovated.

Two other friends came to their rescue with a jeep, but for reasons which are not yet clear, all five were in the Fiesta when it slipped from the embankment and into the water.

Sad and shocking as it is, I wouldn’t mention it here except that I drove down there with my family only a week ago. We enjoyed a lovely meal in Castletownbere during which we were told that Dunboy Castle was worth a look. On the way out of the town the castle is signposted so we decided to go look. Here are a few pictures. Judging by the picture on the RTE website I’d say they went into water very close to where I parked a week earlier. That freaks me out a little bit.

Dunboy Castle

Dunboy Castle

Dunboy Castle

Dune vs Queen: Who Wants to Live Forever

The first time I heard this Dune cover of Queen’s “Who Wants to Live Forever” I thought, “Oh Wow! That’s good!”

Then, 30 seconds into the song I thought, “Wait a second. This is actually fairly boring. The voice that sounded nice at the start really sounds weak, there’s no feeling, it goes nowhere and the video is rubbish.”

Here’s the original song by Queen. Turn the volume up. It’ll send a shiver down your spine and you’ll realise how good Freddie’s voice was. Amazing stuff.

How to successfully spam blogs (and how to fight back)

What you’re about to learn isn’t anything new. It’s not particularly earth shattering either, but a lot of people don’t know it.

NOFOLLOW DOES NOT WORK (properly)

You may have noticed legitimate looking comments on your blog from people with suspect names. Usually the name will be a brand name, service or literally anything that sells. The commenter’s website is obviously related to that business. Why do they bother using special keywords when Google is supposed to not follow those links? Do they know something you don’t? Yup. They know that keywords, even on nofollowed links, matter. I’d provide reference links to SEO blogs explaining this but then they’d know I’m reading and they might shut up.

So, how do you go about spamming blogs? (And how do you defend against those spammers?) Here are two examples:

How to spam a niche blog

George, who runs 858graphics obviously makes signs in San Diego. I’m sorry that his store was egged last year, but he’s obviously trying to manipulate Google. Unfortunately, he succeeded. He is #2 in Google for “San Diego Signs”. Strangely enough there are no links to his website.

How to spam a niche blog

This second guy isn’t quite so successful, and to think he’s spamming my poor Shih Tzu, Oscar. The spammer’s domain is near the bottom of the first page of a Google search for Shih Tzu Checks. That’s still pretty good considering he doesn’t have any links to that page either.

How did these guys find my blog? The first guy searched for WordPress blog posts with comments. The second looked for a page saying, “leave a reply”, an open invitation to spam if ever there was one!

Out of curiosity I followed the Google search a recent spammer used. On the blogs surrounding my blog in that search I found traces of him everywhere. He left legit looking comments but the link was always full of keywords for his business.

Stuffing keywords in nofollowed links certainly helps rank for keywords.

So, you want to know how to fight back? It’s very simple if you’re using WordPress:

  1. Install my Comment Referrers plugin. That will add a line at the end of the moderation emails with the referrer of the visitor. Some referrers should ring alarm bells!
  2. Install Delink Comment Author. This plugin removes the link the comment author left as their URL. I modified my install so it removes the email too as I moderate comments from new users.
  3. I was planning on coding this next plugin, but I found Lucia’s Link Love first and that saved me the trouble. I modified mine so it doesn’t hyper link the name of a comment author who has left less than a certain number of comments. See this comment as an example. That “Landscape Artist” never came back to my blog again so his “name” isn’t linked to his site.

So, chances are a few more people are going to try this technique now that I’ve blogged about it. I bet many more blog owners will be more vigilant of it now though. It’s your blog. If you don’t want to be pawn to a spammer then fight back!

Edit: Here is my version of Lucia’s Linky Love. Just rename this file to .php and drop into your plugins folder. If you’re not logged in or have a comment cookie in your browser you should see some comment author’s names won’t be linked.

A right tool

Scanning Gmail’s spam folder (815 emails after 2 days) is much more entertaining when I remember that all those messages about a longer tool refer to a completely different thing in Cork.

Sort of. 9 pages of spam.

I need to scan them because Gmail catches an alarming number of legitimate email, despite all my training. Sheesh.

Sell your soul for a luxury weekend in the country

What would you do for a luxury self catering weekend in the West of Ireland? Would you sell your soul and help launch a Google bomb?

Well, the good people at Glengarrriff Lodge would like you to link to their website with the keywords “Luxury Self Catering” in the link. Do that, and link to someone else who may be interested in the weekend and you’ll be entered in a draw for a weekend at the Lodge worth up to 1175 Euro! Nice eh?

Glengarriff Lodge

Anyway, now that my blog is squeaky clean, I couldn’t possibly consider subverting Google’s search engine. No sirree, but it looks like a gorgeous location so I decided to give it a plug anyway.

Oh, I’ll be in that part of the country in the next few weeks so I might call in and say hi!

Close

Ad-blocker not detected

Consider installing a browser extension that blocks ads and other malicious scripts in your browser to protect your privacy and security. Here are a few options.

  • uBlock Origin is a free, open source, ad blocker for your browser.
  • Use pi-hole if you have a spare Raspberry Pi on your network.
  • Set the private DNS settings on your phone to dns.adguard.com to block adverts and trackers.