Comments Back On Line
November 11, 2003 1 | Comments (Closed)
Just an update on the status of Asterisk* — Everything is back to normal and comments are now working again.
What had happened is a whole shit-load of comment spam made it past my blacklist and took down the server. My host got it back up and put a lock on my public cgi scripts, which is totally reasonable but a bit inconvenient for me and my users.
I talked them into setting those back up, with the promise that I’d try to “strengthen” my blacklist, which I did. I’ve added a bunch of catchalls for “questionable” terms that seem to keep showing up in spam. If this blocks someone form posting my suggestion is to leave your URL off.
The thing is, I’m not a reciprocal link factory. I don’t mind if you link to your site in your comments, as long as those comments are relevant. If I feel you are spamming or trying to use my site as a jumping point for your Google ranking you will be deleted and added to the blacklist, which I plan on sharing out (as soon as I have time) with others.
It’s too bad we can’t share out our blacklists with Google and have them remove these sites from their system. That would put an end to this crap once and for all I’d bet.
Filed under: My Sites
Comments
1. Matt said:
I think you’d find Google would be fairly reponsive to any blacklists you send their way, if you could get a decent number of other webmasters backing you up. Google is obviously a fan of blogs, considering their pagerank system and the Google AdSense bar I’m looking at to the right of what I’m writing right here, which it seems to me was developed in large part for bloggers.
If you get something together, I’d be more than happy to throw my small, meaningless hat into the ring for support.
Posted on November 15, 2003 10:55 AM | #
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