Daily Bytes

Just a few thoughts on how to fight comment spamming... First of all a few pointers on the subject:

• Dive into Mark [Weblog Spam]
• Blam! - Blacklist Manager
• Comment spammers redux
• Spam meets blogs
• When the Spam hits the Blogs
  

So, what are the motivations behind comment spammers?

• Posting millions of links in the web will statistically  make lots of them be clicked in the long run. This is the same motivation e-mail spammers have.
• Blogs, due to their nature, give a major contribution to Google Pagerank. Having lots of blogs pointing to the spammers webpage makes their Page Rank and their visit number rise.

So, How can we stop them? There are three ways of stopping or controlling spam.

• Not letting them post or making it harder for them to post.
• Letting them post but then removing their comments from your blog.
• Making it less actractive.
  

Not letting them post:

• IP throttling - Spammers can easily get a 300000 blog list and comment in each one of them a a time making it hard to use this technic.
  
• Black-listing words - This might help solving the problem. I know they can write S E X, or even s3x, instead of sex, but no one looks for that word in Google. If we were talking about spam e-mail it would be a different story.
  
• Black-listing IPs - Doesn't seem to really solve anything as if someone can change IP easily that someone are the spammers.
  
• Black-listing open proxies - I don't think this would solve anything. The only thing it would accomplish would be to annoy a couple blog users.
  
• Mass Black-listing - That's what the blam project is all about. If you have several blogs working together they can do IP throttling much more efficiently.
  
• Comment reviewing - Manually review every comment. 100% efficience but try receiving 20000 comments in one hour.
• Bayesian filters - Might be a nice idea.
• Disabling comments - Try to comment on my blog now ...
• Robot detection - Detecting if the poster is a robot or a real human using technics like image analysis.
• Honey pots - Fake posts used to maintain black-lists
  

Removing Comments:

• Mass comment deletion and comment search by keyword and date - This would help where the other methods fail.
  

Making it pay less:

• Redirecting all urls through a special page making the links not count towards Page Rank.

Bottomline: There isn't a magic solution that will solve comment spamming one and for all but implementing a wide range of solutions might help controling the problem.

For everyone that has problems deciding where to have lunch each and everyday:

Welcome to Dr.Lunch
Basically, this is how it works. First, you create a (totally free) account with Dr.Lunch, so the Doctor can keep up with what restaurants you do and don't like. Once you've done that, you'll either join a group you've been invited to, or you can start your own group and invite other people to join it. Heck, you can even do both if you want to. If you're starting a new group, you probably want to add a handful of restaurants to kick things off. You can do this via a link on the main page once you've created an account. If you're joining an existing group, there should be some restaurants already in place, but you can always add more. As other people join, they'll add more restaurants, and give their own ratings to existing restaurants, making lunch better and better.

Some nice reviews and opinions about blog.com:

• DeLaranja
• Karlus (in portuguese)
• If-Then-Else 
• Topku (in chinese?)
• Keso (in chinese?)
• Público - Computadores (major Portuguese newspaper)
• The English Manager
• Reflective Surface
• DotCafé (in portuguese)
• JornalismoPortoNet (in portuguese)

Finally my pet project for the last few months is online. It's still in beta testing and with registration by invite only but things are looking smooth and features are beeing added all the time.

Really nice article by Mark on the freedom of open source software. Mark changed from MT to Wordpress after checking MT 3.0 new feature$. I don't always agree with what Mark says but this time he is 100% correct. This one quote is great :

dive into mark
Movable Type is a dead end. In the long run, the utility of all non-Free software approaches zero. All non-Free software is a dead end.

In Portugal there's this one sports website where you can access it between 8h and 20h. Outside that schedule you either have to pay them or use their ISP.

Well, guess what? Just turn javascript off and you're set to go.

Teaching is a two way flow. Most of the times you teach your students something new, but sometimes they teach you.

This one was found by a student during one of my classes. He was looking for a form generator and was displeased with the ones PEAR provides.

Formsess is a form generator built to work with Smarty, the PHP template engine I use. Much better than using PEAR's HTML Quick Form, Smarty Renderer and its unexistant error control methods.

The ultimate mod: an apartment turned into a Star Trek episode set. The photos are amazing, specially the before and after ones. It's at sale at ebay so if you're a Star Trek fan with $1,000,000 go get it :-)

F.C. Porto progresses to the Champions League final in a brilliant game at Riazor Stadium.