geeky tutorials, tips, guides and reviews
Anybody else getting more YouTube spam lately?
I have noticed a few more trickling in lately – so decided to do something about it. If you go visit your My Account page and hunt for around 10 minutes you will find a link for E-mail Options. From there, you can set YouTube to “Don’t send any emails for the above events”.
Hit save, and you should be all fixed up. No offense lovemeChristy72, your just not my kind of girl though.
This spam E-mail I just got was just too good not to share. Only thing edited out was the URL they were pushing me to. Brings new meaning to the old “dog eat dog world” saying hu?
Hello my friend!
I am ready to kill myself and eat my dog, if medicine prices here are bad.
Look, the site and call me 1-800 if its wrong..
My dog and I are still alive
Happy to hear they made it out of the E-mail alright. If he kills himself though, how will he eat his dog?
I’ve been looking for a good WordPress comment to help me fight the comment and trackback spam I have been getting lately. One solution was to turn off commenting for posts that were so many days old. I like this idea – because I highly doubt somebody today is going to feel motivated to comment on something I posted two or three years ago.
With that said, I found the tool I was looking for in Comment Timeout. This wonderful plugin allows you to:
I have used this on the Web Hosting Show’s Web site for a few days now and have been enjoying the result. As soon as I get the time to do so, I’ll be rolling this out on all of my Web sites.
Back when this blog was on Blogware, fighting trackback and comment spam was impossible. The filtering scripts were not that good and all around, I just had to moderate by hand, which is no easy task for a popular Web site of any shape or size.
When I moved to my own hosting account with WordPress installed, my battle with spam got a heck of a lot easier.
For me, 99% of my spam and trackback spam is filtered out by the Askimet WordPress plugin. If Askimet doesn’t do it for you, or you need even more protection though – I have a few suggestions.
Spam Karma 2 – This plugin works by running all of your comments and trackbacks through a list of tests, and then grades it by “karma”. It also has a few other spam prevention tools built in as well. If Askimet wasn’t working for me, this would be my number two choice.
Comment Timeout – This neat tool allows you to turn commenting off for older posts. Chances are if they haven’t added a comment in a year, they never will. This will leave less holes for spammers to find to post their “v1agra” loving messages.
Bad Behavior – Bad Behavior is a set of PHP scripts which prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots.
One word of caution, don’t go overboard with spam filtering or you are going to piss off your readers. If they have to jump through 20 hoops to post a comment and so that you can say you get no comment or trackback spam, you are not going to see too many new comments on your Web site.
You need to find the thin line between filtering crap and keeping comment posting easy for your readers.
Need more? Check out this list of anti-spam plugins via the WordPress Web site. The list looks a little out of date with some of the links, but should be a good place to get started at least.
We all want to be better known, don’t we? Well, it can’t happen overnight – but I have a few tips that will help you get on the right track when it comes to building up your own publicity machine. In addition to that I’ll have the news of the week, and a promo worth listening to right here on the Web Hosting Show.
Need a few WordPress plugin suggestions? Well I might be able to say a few nice things about a few of them. To tell you the truth, these have been the icing on the cake when it comes to moving my Web site over from other services.
+ Askimet
Askimet has pretty much killed everything it should have and plays nice with all my other stuff. Comparing my old Blogware 100 or more trackback and comment spam (a day/per blog) I got with this is like comparing apples to oranges. Askimet has at least saved me 20 minutes or more a day from deleting trackback spam to doing more important things.
+ Audio Player WordPress plugin
This is the perfect addition to any podcast’s Web site. I used this most of all on the Web Hosting Show’s new layout, but it might have to make an appearance on some of my other projects as well. Adding a player is as easy as typing in a few keystrokes into a post.
This Plugin really helped me when it came to moving my Web sites from Blogware to WordPress. I love using FeedBurner, and didn’t want to give it up. The FeedBurner Plugin just needs a little setup and then you don’t have to worry about it ever again. I like that.
Want to add a contact form to your WordPress Web site? This is the tool for you. All you need to do is configure, then cut and paste a little code in, and you are done.
There are many more great WordPress plugins that I didn’t mention as well. All and all, I have to say I am becoming happier and happier with my new WordPress setups.
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Mitch Keeler is nothing more than your average Joe trying to leave his mark on the world though both his professional work and his online projects, articles, podcasts and more.
Akismet Help and How-tos
The way it works is it checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not, then you can review if necessary.
Akismet Says I Need an API Key. Where Do I Get That?
WordPress.com has what’s called “API keys” which allow you to use services and enhancements built on the WordPress.com platform. This allows you to leverage the power of WP.com while still hosting your blog elsewhere.
All you have to do is sign up for a WordPress.com account, and you will get your API key to add to your Akismet settings so it will work.
I Deleted Akismet Before I Knew How Awesome it Was. How Can I Get it Back?
You can download the spam comment fighting plugin here:
http://akismet.com/download/
How Can I Show a Badge of How Many Spam Comments I Have Filtered Out?
If you want to put the Akismet fear of God into any spam commenters looking at your site as a target, just cut and paste this tag into your template:
<?php akismet_counter(); ?>That will display how many spam comments Akismet has caught for you.
I Am Getting a Akismet 2.1 Parse Error. How Can I Fix It?
You can find a fix here or better yet, upgrade Akismet to the latest version, which fixes this bug that was in the Akismet 2.1 release.
Where Can I Find More Help for Akismet?
Try searching the WordPress.org forums. Using the “akismet” tag, you are bound to turn up a lot of results to browse through too:
http://wordpress.org/tags/akismet