February 2005 Archives

I got a comment today. See if you can spot anything suspicious about it.

%syn(Cool|Nice|Rulezz)% %syn(blog,|portal| site ! I)% hope to make %syn(my own|own weblog|my diary)%, not worse than yours ;)

Gosh, no, nothing suspect about that...

("not worse than yours"?! Cheeky.)

The "nofollow" attribute was recently introduced (see announcements by Google and Yahoo), the theory being if links in comments don't count towards the target's ranking in search engines, spammers will be less inclined to spam blogs. I'm still sceptical. Spamming blogs costs nothing, and the process can be automated. Unless every single blog on the net upgrades to use the nofollow attribute, I don't think there's any reason for the spammers to stop.

I don't think I'll be uninstalling MT-Blacklist any time soon...

I upgraded the hotlink prevention on tetrap.com to use a method suggested by Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention on A List Apart. I have a lot of trouble with hotlinkers, mainly from message boards and people linking to album covers from EBay.

The new method allows linking to pictures like so but prevents the use of the img tag for imbedding. I've implemented the script in Perl rather than PHP, and it also checks to make sure the image exists (and returns a 404 if it doesn't), so is a slight improvement over the A List Apart method.