Tag Archives: spam

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I am sick and tired of useless automated Email replies. Just turn them off! Because nobody cares. It’s a waste of bandwidth and a waste of everyone’s time! It messes up automated systems such as my support tickets or it ends up in spam anyway.

I don’t mean the real ones where you actually have something to relay to the original sender.
You know, when you’re away for more than a week. That’s fine, annoying sometimes but useful at the same time. It keeps me from wondering why you are ignoring me.

But, then this happened…

Earlier this week someone posted a support ticket. Which generates a confirmation email. Which got replied to by the persons auto responder which created another ticket and confirmation which got replied to by the auto responder. This created a 3rd ticket which again generated a ticket confirmation. Which got a automated response which made you end up in my servers spam queue.

Yes!! Serves you right!

And quite regularly when clearly the person is present and actively emailing me. There is this cheery message telling me the person is out of the office for vacation.

No you’re not, you just emailed me an hour ago! So turn that thing off!

And then the spammy ones that say;

Thanks for emailing me, check out my website in the meantime!

No, I won’t. Unless it’s work related I’m fairly sure I do not want to know about your website. Nor will your site tell me the stuff I emailed you for.

Or this;

Thanks for emailing, we’ll reply shortly.

Great, I didn’t expect a reply immediately anyway. And yes, you will reply shortly because we’re talking business.

So do everyone a favor and just… turn off the email responders! :(

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Recently a bunch of chinese (?) bots have taken it upon themselves to ruin my day by spamming every photo and image i ever posted on this site.
1236 spam comments in one day, every day, for the past 2 weeks orso.
Today however i finally noticed they were only after attachments.

I have akismet installed, and that filters out all spam so far. But isn’t it even better if they can’t post at all?
So i took a good look at my database. Turns out that all attachments (images, zip files, flash etc.) had comments and trackbacks on.

Well, that’s solved easily…

So i accessed PHPMyAdmin and ran this query:
UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `comment_status` = 'closed', `ping_status` = 'closed' WHERE `post_type` = 'attachment';

That should prevent any and all comments and trackbacks on all attachments ever made. Yay!
Now let’s see if it works and i get less spam.

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I signed up for Facebook a few years ago. And back then i used a PC without a spam filter. Obviously i got a lot of spam.
Somewhere last year i gave up on Facebook as it added no friends (no real ones anyway) and it wasn’t interesting at all to even participate in the things Facebook offers.
I had since switched to mail accounts with better spam filters and when Facebook stopped the spam stopped. I so rarely got spam, it was kinda odd to have it. And usually they were those silly things with fake russian women or the like. The odd nigerian offering me millions.

Now a few months ago i re-opened my Facebook and my mailbox is full of spam again, daily. Now it’s odd to NOT have spam. What’s up with that… Anyone noticed that too?

Stupid Facebook! Destroyer of interwebs!

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As of today i have altered the registration process of both this website and the forum. The Forum registration has been suspended indefinitely and all registrations go via this website.

All mail.ru domains are blocked from registering without exceptions. More can follow later as i see fit.

This is my latest attempt to prevent bots to register on my websites. I’m sorry if this prevents you from registering. Use a more trusted domain.

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Over the past few days i’ve been working on a small plugin to keep my user database clean for WordPress and BBpress.

Everyone who registers now has to actively participate on the forum or your account will be deleted after 4 days. This is an automated process, i won’t be reviewing the deletions of accounts.

So if you have created an account just to review statistics your account might be gone. This will be fixed in the future. If your account is lost. You can re-register of course. But make sure you create a topic or reply to one within a few days or it will be deleted again. In in a later release of the statistics plugin i wrote you will be able to claim your blog and see some specific stats. If you do so, your account is protected from deletion. This option is NOT available yet!

I had chosen to activate this plugin after the option to claim your site was made available but due to some spam attack or something i’m kinda forced to introduce this today.