Archive for the 'WordPress' Category

Mothballing WordPress

Sunday, September 6th, 2009

There’s yet another WordPress exploit in the wild, so I’ve decided to mothball this WordPress installation rather than upgrading the moribund blog. I will be removing wp-admin and all other commonly-exploited files, and leaving only what is required to display old entries.

Comments, it goes without saying, are closed.

The Blog is Back

Wednesday, October 11th, 2006

I can’t resist blogging about weird new sudoku variants and the perpetual accident that is the T, so the blog is back. The website is also back at the ficml.org domain, although some links may be broken.

More news to follow at a more decent hour.

WordPress in Amber

Monday, July 3rd, 2006

As of this post, the blog is officially petrified. I don’t have WordPress running here at freeshell.org; instead I have static copies of all the pages up for future reference. Future news will be posted in my LiveJournal, I suppose: jemimap.livejournal.com.

On the Road Again

Monday, May 29th, 2006

I was doing a database backup in order to upgrade WordPress to the latest and greatest when I saw that my hosting service will be closing up shop on July 31st. So instead of upgrading, I closed all comments to keep the spammers at bay for the interim.

Where will I go? What will I do?

I haven’t been blogging much lately, so I may just close down the blog and slink back to freeshell.org, my former host. They have some PHP support now, or so I hear (but not a free database for WordPress).

Despamming

Tuesday, July 19th, 2005

I haven’t looked at the comment spam in a while, so about a thousand of them had piled up in moderation, and a bunch also got through the filters. I’ve adjusted the filters to handle most of the new crafty spam, but I recommend against discussing gambling, drugs, or mortgages in the comments.

WordSpam

Friday, April 1st, 2005

Birthday of the day: Apple is 29 today, and Gmail is 1.

Apparently, the WordPress guys have been spamming Google, using their (formerly) sky-high page rank and hidden links to raise shady ad revenues. Google Is Not Amused, so you’ll no longer find search results like this one.

Some WP supporters object to calling it spam, but this is disingenuous. “Google bombing” and the like are frequently referred to as search engine spamming; if you don’t want to be called a spammer you shouldn’t behave like one.

Back in Blog

Monday, February 21st, 2005

Apology of the Day: The management apologizes for having a life.

While I was off having a life, the spam trackbacks kept coming in. Most of them get moderated, but I’m tired of the zillion trackback spam moderation emails which have replaced my zillion comment spam moderation emails. So I tried some advice from the wordpress wiki - the SQL to close trackbacks on all old posts:

UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status="closed";

Trackbacks are open on this post and the last. I so rarely get trackbacked that I don’t expect this change to affect anyone.

Trackspammers

Sunday, February 6th, 2005

iPod of the day: The iPod Stereoscope.

The management apologizes for the lack of blog. I haven’t been up to anything exciting–just fending off the latest rage of trackback spam. It’s all 0n1ine p0ker stuff so far, but because of the way trackback works, the Amazing Anti-Spam Checkbox isn’t stopping it. Instead it goes straight into moderation and I get umpteen notices about it.

Sigh.

Update: Phil Ringnalda is ready to give up on TrackBack altogether.

Anti-Spamming

Tuesday, January 11th, 2005

The anti-spam checkbox seems to be working well, so I’ll give out the geeky instructions now. As mentioned earlier, this method was taken from This Chick. Since it does exactly what it appears to do, I’m not giving anything away by revealing the inner workings to the spammers. (The incest spammers already have it figured out.)

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Tricksy Spammers

Saturday, January 8th, 2005

I’m saddened to report that the hentai spammers have already bypassed the anti-spam checkbox. As a consequence, commenters will no longer be able to say “incest” with impunity. Dirty words will once again be moderated.

Here’s hoping the viagra folks aren’t as quick on the uptake.