Category Archives: Discourse.net

New Form of Comment Spam?

I'm getting a series of comments that are like classic comment spam—a vague phrase, out of context, stuck seemingly at random on old posts (e.g. “charity begins at home”). Usually these are just a cover to link to some site that is trying to raise its googlerank. What's odd about these is that all the “author” links are to pages of the form nohomepage.domain.com where “domain” is a domain that is not registered. So those links don't work.

The comments also have a 'hidden' link to a second domain (usually the period is hyperlinked). But those domains don't resolve either.

So I think I'll prune them. But I admit that I can't see the point of this sort of spam except (1) to bury existing comments or, maybe, (2) to lull bloggers into a false sense of security when they check the domains and find they don't work…and then activate something in them next week (or sell them) with an increased googlerank.

UPDATE (6/15): Adding

(nohomepage)[\w-_.]*.[a-z]{2,}

to my MT-Blacklist blocking list seems to do the trick…

Posted in Discourse.net | 2 Comments

I’ve Switched to Creative Commons 2.0

I've switched the license for this blog to version 2.0 of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License, as indicated by this nice gif:

somerights20.gif

Creative Commons offers a discussion of the differences between version 1.0 and 2.0.

Posted in Discourse.net, Law: Copyright and DMCA | Comments Off on I’ve Switched to Creative Commons 2.0

Formatting Woes (Long URLs in Comments Dept.)

Sometimes readers put URLs in their comments. That's good. Sometimes they format them as HTML URLs with short text to click on. That's even better. If we're just in the 'good' zone, then funny things can happen while a comment with a long URL is one of the five most recent comments showing in the right margin—at least in most browsers.

Apparently, if you read this blog with Firefox, it handles comments with long URLs fine. But I gather that if you use pretty much anything else, it doesn't. So when people put a long URL in plaintext into their comments, and it shows up in the right margin as one of the five most recent, it shoves that column left, making it look as if the middle column got too big.

I've fixed the problem for today by editing the comment that was causing the problem, but if there's a more general fix, I don't know what it is, since MT's parser isn't built to deal with this.

Thank you to the people who were kind enough to warn me about the problem. I'll keep an eye out for it.

Posted in Discourse.net | 2 Comments

Hardly Anyone Reads this Blog on Sundays

Thank you to all the people who have been reading, and linking to, Discourse.net.

Below I have a discussion of traffic trends, comments and comment deletions, and other bloggy stuff. If you're reading this directly, I've hidden it behind the “There's More” link so as not to bother people who have better things to do. If you are taking the feed, my apologies.

Continue reading

Posted in Discourse.net | 4 Comments

I’m the ‘Daily Link’

Thank you to Jeff (aka Emma Goldman?) of the alarmingly titled Notes on the Atrocities for picking Discourse.net as the “Daily Link”.

Posted in Discourse.net | 1 Comment

Apache Was Resting

The site was down for several hours this evening as the apache server decided to go on strike. Dreamhost Support reports it “had a bad user” and fixed it. I hope that's not a moral judgement.

Meanwhile I had a tour through my http logs, always a fun way to spend time, and noticed many entries of the form

junk after document element at line 2, column 0

I have no idea what that means.

Plus I found substantial evidence that a machine hosted at Brown has been trying to hack in here. And failing. But I sent a note with a log extract to the tech contact for the IP number on the off chance it might do some good.

Posted in Discourse.net | Comments Off on Apache Was Resting