Tag Archives: email

Fighting Spam — All Kinds

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How I deal with comment and pingback spam.

I start each morning pretty much the same way. I make myself a cup of coffee, make a scrambled egg for my parrot, and then sit down at the kitchen table and check the comments that came into my blog overnight.

About Spam

The main thing I’m checking for each morning is comment and pingback spam. These are similar but different.

  • Comment spam is a comment that exists solely to provide one or more links to another Web site, usually to promote that site or its services, but possibly to just get links to that site to improve Google rankings. Comment spam ads nothing to the site’s value. Sometimes disguised as a guest book entry or general positive comment — for example, “Great blog! I’ll be back!” accompanied by a link or two — it simply isn’t something the average blogger should want on his or her site.
  • Pingback spam is a comment that appears as a result of a link on another blog pinging your blog. Although many pingbacks are legitimate (as many comments are legitimate), there appears to be a rise in pingbacks as a result of feed scraping, which I’ve discussed here and here. Pingback spam is usually pretty easy to spot; the software that scapes the feeds isn’t very creative, so the excerpt is usually an exact quote from what’s been scraped. Sometimes, oddly enough, the quote is from the copyright notice that appears at the bottom of every feed item originating from this site. Pingbacks automate the linking of your site to someone elses — in the case of pingback spam, it’s likely to be a splogger.

Lucky me: I get both.

Tools to Fight Comment Spam

Fortunately, I use both Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2 (many thanks again to Miraz for suggesting both of these), so the spam comments that get through their filters and are actually posted to the site are minimized. On a typical day, I might just have 3 to 5 of them. Compare that to 3,400 potential spam messages stopped by Bad Behavior in the past week and the 51,000 spam messages deleted after posting by Spam Karma in the past year since its installation. Without these two forms of protection, I’d be spending all day cleaning up spam.

Anyone who doesn’t use some kind of spam protection on a blog with open comments is, well, an idiot.

Neither program is very effective against pingback spam, although Spam Karma seems to be catching a few of them these days. Although I’m pretty sure I can set up WordPress to reject pingbacks, I like the idea of getting legitimate links from other blogs. It helps form a community. And it provides a service to my readers. For example, if I wrote an article about something and another blogger quoted my work and added his insight to it, his article might interest my readers. Having a link in my comments right to his related post is a good thing.

My Routine

So my morning routine consists of checking Spam Karma’s “Approved Comments” and marking the comments that are spam as spam. Then I go into WordPress’s Comments screen (Dashboard > Manage > Comments) and marking pingback spam as spam and deleting it.

Why do it both ways? Well, I’m concerned that if I keep telling Spam Karma that pingback spam is spam, it’ll think all pingbacks are spam. I don’t want it to do that. So I manually delete them. It only takes a minute or two, so it isn’t a big deal. If I had hundreds of these a day, I might do things differently.

The other reason I delete the pingbacks manually is because I want to check each site that’s pinging mine. I collect URLs of splogging sites and submit them periodically to Google. These sites violate Google’s Terms of Service and I’m hoping Google will either cancel their AdSense accounts or remove them from Google’s search indexing (or, preferably, both). So I send the links to Google and Google supposedly looks at them.

I’m working on a project to make creating a DMCA notice easier — almost automated — and would love to hear from anyone working on a project like that.

This morning was quiet. Only three spams to kill: one comment spam and two pingback spams. I’ll get a few more spams during the day and kill them as they arrive; WordPress notifies me via e-mail of all comments and pingbacks as they are received. (I don’t check my e-mail at the breakfast table anymore.)

Do you have a special way to deal with comment or pingback spam? Don’t keep it a secret. Leave a Comment below.

Aircraft User Fees

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And why general aviation pilots and businesses should be fighting back.

There’s been a lot of talk — and fighting against — the Bush Administration’s “Next Generation Air Transportation System Financing Reform Act of 2007.” I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have all the details. But here are a few things that seem pretty clear to me.

Higher Fees Hurt Business

The User Fee system proposed by the Bush Administration may severely cut the activities of general aviation pilots. According to AOPA President Phil Boyer, “Nine out of 10 AOPA members have told us that this would reduce, curtail, or end their flying.” What’s that going to do for the aviation industry? As current pilots who can no longer afford to fly regularly sell off their aircraft, the used aircraft market becomes flooded. Fewer people will be buying new aircraft, so manufacturers will suffer. Suppliers to those manufacturers will suffer, as will employees all around.

As costs increase for general aviation businesses like flight schools, charter services, and tour outfits, those costs get passed along to consumers. That drives prices up, possibly making these services too costly for the marketplace. There are fewer customers. Businesses fail. This continues the cycle of used aircraft sales and unemployment.

Proposal Seems to Ask General Aviation Pilots to Bail Out Airlines

Shifting the cost of ATC services from airlines — which are responsible for hundreds of thousands of passenger hours a day — to general aviation is simply unfair. Many of these companies are failing financially because of their top-heavy management organization and unreasonable pay scales. Why is it that some airlines — Southwest comes to mind — are financially fit and offer good service to their customers while other airlines — think United — can’t stay afloat without government funds and pension rule changes? Could it be that some companies are simply managed better than others?

Do you think it would be fair for all people who use banks to pay a certain tax to the government for a fund that’ll bail out mismanaged banks that go under? Like the ones that gave out mortgages to anyone capable of writing their name on a form, no matter what their financial situation was?

Or how about a tax on drivers to be put in a fund to bail out automakers who don’t build the cars we want to buy at a price want to pay?

Or a tax on homeowners living in the desert for a fund that rebuilds oceanfront summer homes destroyed by hurricanes?

Is any of that fair?

Get Involved!

If you think the administration’s proposal is a bad one — or even if you want to learn more — get involved. If you’re an AOPA member, you can sign up to get e-mail notifications of developments, as well as instructions on how you can contact your government representatives to tell them what you think.

You can also go to this page to get more information about the funding debate.

Don’t wait until it’s too late. Act now.

ICE

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In case of emergency.

The other day, I received one of those “forward to all your friends” e-mail messages from a friend. Although I usually wind up deleting most of them, this one was worth sharing. It contained information about the “ICE: In Case of Emergency” program.

Here’s the message:

We all carry our mobile phones with hundreds of names/ numbers stored in its memory but who, other than ourselves, knows which of these numbers belong to our near and dear ones?

If we are involved in an accident or have a heart attack and the people attending us get hold of our mobile phone, they won’t know which number to call to inform our family members.  Yes, there are many numbers stored but which one is the contact person in case of an emergency?

For this reason, we must have one or more telephone numbers stored under the name ICE (In case of Emergency) in our mobile phones.

Recently, the concept of “ICE” is catching up quickly.  It is simple, an important method of contact during emergency situations.

As cell phones are carried by majority of the population, just store the number of a contact person or person who should be contacted at during emergency as ICE (meaning In Case of Emergency).

The idea was thought up by a paramedic who found that when he went to the scenes of accidents, there were always mobile phones with patients, but they didn’t know which number to call.

He therefore thought that it would be a good idea if there was a nationally recognized name for this purpose.

Following a disaster in London , the East Anglican Ambulance Service has launched a national “In case of Emergency (ICE)” campaign.

In an emergency situation, Emergency Service personnel and hospital staff would then be able to quickly contact your next of kin, by simply dialing the number stored as “ICE”.

Please forward this.  It won’t take too many “forwards” before every body will know about this.

It really could save your life, or put a loved one’s mind at rest.

For more than one contact name simply enter ICE1, ICE2 and ICE3 etc. A great idea that will make a difference!

Let’s spread the concept of ICE by storing an ICE number in our mobile phones today!  Please forward to your all nearest and dearest.

The ICE program does indeed exist and it seems like a pretty good idea. If you want to learn more, check out the ICE entry on Wikipedia.

Excel Book Done

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That’s book number 68.

ImageI put the finishing touches on Microsoft Office Excel 2007: Visual QuickStart Guide. It’s my 68th book (I just counted) and right now, I feel as if I wrote them all yesterday.

Okay, so not that tired.

I had some trouble with this book. First, there was the beta software situation. Not only did I have to work with the Office 2007 beta, but I had to run it on the Vista beta. Double Microsoft Windows betas for a person who usually works on a Mac! You can imagine my concern.

But everything went pretty smoothly with that and I’ve been using release versions since January, so I know everything in the book is based on the final software.

Motivation slowed me down a bit in the middle of the project. I think I really need an editor cracking a whip over my head to get me to work at my old pace. These days, I’d rather fly than write about Excel. (Can you imagine?) The thing that snapped me out of it was money. If I don’t make milestones, my publisher does not send checks. Although Flying M Air is now paying all of its own bills — thank heaven; you should see some of those bills! — it’s not paying my bills. If I don’t write, I don’t eat. And since I like to eat, I became motivated.

Of course, the killer was my February hard disk crash and the two weeks it took me to get everything back to normal here. What a productivity killer! But it taught me a new valuable lesson about backups — you think I would have learned the last two times — and my old dual G5 is still running, now with a new hard disk to go with last year’s new motherboard. Sheesh. (Now you know why I bought AppleCare for my MacBook Pro.)

I churned through the last few chapters relatively quickly, anxious to meet deadlines tied to promotional opportunities. (I’m not sure of those promos really exist or if my editor has learned to tell me about fantasy promos to get me to work faster. I wouldn’t blame her if she made it up.) I had first pass files done last week and spent the past few days finalizing files based on edits. Today, after fooling around a bit — I’m the queen of procrastination — I laid out the index, created an ad for the book’s companion Web site, and turned it all in. The e-mail message I sent to my editor said:

I think I’m done. Can you ask them to send that final check? (Still waiting for the last one, too.)

The book weighs in at 360 pages, which is about the same as the last edition. It’s got the new VQS cover design. It lists for $21.99, but you can buy it from Amazon.com for $14.95 right now, which is 32% off. (Not a bad deal.) It should be in stores by April 20 or thereabouts.

Meanwhile, life goes on.

Tomorrow, I have to take my helicopter in to the avionics shop in Mesa to see if they can figure out why my radio isn’t working right. I have a meeting with a marketing guy down there at 10 AM. Then a tour of Phoenix for a man and his daughter at 2. Somewhere in between, I’ll have lunch with Mike, who has been away for the past few days. Then a flight home.

Friday I get started on my next book. Those of you who know me should know what that is.

More on AdSense Splogs

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Four more pingbacks from feedscrapers today!

After writing my two splogging-related posts this morning, I went for a flight with some clients. Just got back a while ago. And what do I find in my e-mail inbox? Four more splog pingbacks!

I also found a message from Jim Mitchell, responding to an e-mail I’d sent him earlier in the day. He included a link to a blog post on MaxPower that provides two good methods for stopping AdSense sploggers. I’m going through it now. But the thing I wanted to share was this explanation of what splogging is, for those of you who have no idea what I’ve been whining about all day.

From Stopping Adsense Splogs & Spammers: Methods that Work on MaxPower:

Imagine searching for something or other on the Internet and arriving at a webpage chocked full of ads and stuffed with the exact keyword you were searching for. The page is of no help because it contains no content of value. Some guy somewhere, created a website that sucks keywords / newstories / content from other websites using RSS, inserted the right keywords to maximize profit from Adsense, and waited for Google to index and rank it high enough for you stumble upon it. Once at the page, the spammer (or spamdexer) hopes that you will click on one of the Adsense ads that seem helpful compared to the rest of the useless random text. This practice of spamdexing wastes your time, its annoying, and you can fight back.

If you’ve seen this on your blog, follow the above link to the MaxPower article to see what you can do about it.