I’ve been told by people over time that the linkboard (top right side of the main page) takes too long to load; it did, after all, consist of 38 separate images adding up to a total of about 70KB. The total size was a bit much already, but the 38 different files that had to be loaded each time the page was viewed, that’s undoubtedly what slowed down most browsers. I’ve been meaning to fix that for a while, and I finally got around to it.

The LinkBoard is still there, but now it is an image map–that is to say, a single image (now 24KB, 1/3 the size) which has the links assigned to each “button” in the image by code. It should load a lot faster and work exactly the same. It just took a bit of effort to set the coding, which is why I put it off for so long.

I’ve also changed the links a bit, getting rid of old and broken links, and adding links I’ve found more valuable as of late.

Ah, you love to hear stories like this one: mass spammer gets sentenced to nine years in prison for sending 53,000 junk emails in a manner violating anti-spam laws. Unfortunately, it’s not completely good news. First, the sentence is being delayed on appeal because of questions about the constitutionality of the new law (you can guess where I stand on that issue). It is possible that this particular scumbag will get his conviction thrown out, and if not, the judge has even stated that he may reduce the sentence anyway. And even if he does go to prison, that will not stem the tide of spam sent to your mailbox or mine; the law can only apply within the U.S., even just within some states, and spammers in other countries may spew away with glee. At best, the local spammers will be inconvenienced and will have to move offshore; however, it is not really comforting to us that the slimeballs will being doing their work from the Cayman Islands rather than from North Carolina.

Worse news still: reports say that by sending out as many as 10 million spams a day, this subhuman crud (is my annoyance with these people showing?) was able to make up to $750,000 a month. I knew that there were enough idiots out there who not only read spam but answer it as well to make spamming profitable, but I am dismayed that there are so many that the practice can be so wildly successful–and remember, the spammer got arrested and tried only because he didn’t identify himself correctly on the spam. Had he done so, it would have made no difference to those suffering from his onslaught, and he would still be doing it today, as so many others still are.

So, what is the answer? In my opinion, we should begin charging for email, but only in a way that hits spammers. Here’s how it works. A new email network gets set up alongside the old one. But to use the new one, you have to put $5 down for your account. Whenever you send an email to someone, you are committed to pay them exactly one cent–but this money is only collected if the recipient claims the fee. For most personal and business messages, the recipient will not claim the fee, so your $5 is never touched. Even if you get charged every once in a while, the cost to you would be negligible. Spam, however, can be automatically filtered and marked “charge the recipient,” and even when it isn’t, just zapping a few dozen spam messages by hand could earn you a quarter or two from the spammers in the short time it takes to send them to your junk mail box. At the end of a few months, you could buy yourself a nice dinner with the proceeds. The bastard who was sending 10 million spams a day would suddenly be liable to shell out $100,000 a day or get his email privileges revoked, and fast.

There would be setup and maintenance costs, to be sure–but if it could get rid of spammers, I’d be happy to pay the few bucks a year necessary to do the job–especially if blog comments and trackback pings could be added into the system somehow….

Two years ago today I made my first post in this blog. 1,195 entries later….

You may have noticed more inactivity on my part. Not through lack of effort, of course–I’ve been trying to write about a recent camera accessory purchase. But after having shut down my server for 18 hours without the slightest notification to me, my web host decided, apparently for kicks, to block out my IP address while at the same time displaying a server status page on their site that showed my server as being shut down. So I was shut out of my own site and their indicators lied to me about why. On top of that, their usually quick support people were a lot slower this time–several hours between each reply–so it took a lot longer to get fixed. It’s just now, some ten hours later, that I’m finally back on the air.

If it weren’t for the fact that every web host screws you over for days at a time at some point, I’d be looking for a new web host right now… and to be honest I’m not that far away from beginning a new search.

If you tried to come here in the past 18 hours and were not able to access the page, my apologies–my web host let me down. They changed the IP address for the server, effectively shutting down the site for most of the last day, and gave me no advance notification of the move. This, of course, would just happen to occur as I get linked to by MacSurfer and was getting hundreds of new visitors each hour. Surpass Hosting is very good when it’s working, but downtime seems to be their biggest flaw. And, to be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever had a web host that reliably notifies me in advance of down time….

I’ve observed a new type of blog comment spam: spam apparently designed purely for reasons of harassment. The spam comes in with no functioning URLs, just links to garbage addresses that have no corresponding site. No product name, no forwarded web site, nothing. It has no profit whatsoever for the spammer that I can see, except perhaps if they get their jollies by peeing all over other people’s web sites. Not that I thought that spammers were any less scummy, to be honest. But they went pretty far in making the spam hard to delete: each one has only nonsense words which vary from spam to spam; each gives a unique (and fake) IP address; and each has different URLs.

Fortunately, I did pick up on one point: each fake, junk URL had a common text string–just a few letters–which were unique enough that I could use it in MT-Blacklist. Otherwise it would have been impossible to block, and each one of the possibly hundreds of spam comments left would have to have been deleted one by one. The common string allowed me to zap all that had been laid and block the others coming in.

Nevertheless, this is getting way out of hand.

Nine months ago this blog broke the 10,000 mark in unique visitors; this month, it broke 20,000. These numbers are not always precise–spammers have an effect, though not as large as they might, since the biggest-volume spammers usually don’t vary their IP addresses (I am still waiting for an MT-Blacklist-style referral spam deletion program; the only ones that exist so far are highly tecchie in nature). But still, the growth of the readership does jibe with expected growth in many respects. Here is a chart showing the progress over the last two years of blogging:

The first spike, in September 2003, came when I was linked to by MacSurfer, and got a highly unusual wave of visitors; the second spike, in September and October 2004, was due to election coverage, and readership waned in November. This month’s spike is largely due to coverage of the Terri Schiavo case. The general trend is an upward one, meaning that I could hit the ludicrous number of 30,000 before the end of this year. I say “ludicrous” because I already cannot accept that even a small percent of the numbers I’m seeing are coming by to visit. Mostly, I have Google to thank–8000 hits from them alone, accounting for 40% of visitors.

Since I started blogging daily, 600 days have passed without a break (okay, when traveling over date lines I blog ahead, but I don’t count that as a break). The two-year anniversary since the first entry of this blog is coming in just two weeks. An average of 1,400 visitors (most of them repeat visitors, it seems) come to this site every day, most by direct address (bookmark, RSS feed, or typing the URL directly into a browser), and most of the rest through search engines like Google. Go figure….

I’ve been writing for a while on how referrer spam is making the blog visitor stats semi-useless. Spammers, hoping that bloggers will list the top several sites which send visitors to them (with links to the referrers included), barrage blogs with massive amounts of fake referrals. That is, they “look at” your blog, and in so doing, fool your site into believing that the “visit” originated from a link on their site leading to yours. The “visit” will be recorded in your logs and their site gets credit as having sent the “visitor” your way via a link on their page, even though the link doesn’t really exist. The more they barrage your site, the higher they will rise in your rankings.

Now, I don’t post such rankings. Most bloggers don’t. And my stats files are in protected directories which others can’t access. So it is for most bloggers. But that doesn’t stop the spammers. Of my top 100 referrers in AwStats, only two are legitimate. The vast majority of the spam referrals are about poker, and probably most if not all are generated by the “Texas Holdem” cockroach that so many bemoan.

Now the good people who write code are finally starting to react–Tony at juju.org has created a script that accesses the MT-Blacklist file to actively clean out log files. Ron at Groovy Mother has created a hack for AwStats that will filter out referral spam from its logs.

So you’d think I’d be a happy camper, right? Except that so far, the hacks introduced are at the same level of many hacks: designed for people who know a lot more about computers than I do, including use of the command line interface. The instructions are greek to me, no for-beginners kind of stuff that says step-by-step what to do. They assume I know exactly where to put the code and how to integrate it, stuff like that. Heck, I have no idea of where AwStats resides on my site or if I can even access it for a hack. Movable Type and MT-Blacklist are the next step up, scripted code but with documentation so you get taken by the hand through the process–well enough, anyway, so that it only takes a limited amount of time scratching your head to figure out how to get it to work. I will, of course, ask on the pages of the scripters if they’ll provide such instructions, but in the past I haven’t had too much luck when I do that.

Still, it’s a great first step to getting the spamming bastards’ maelstrom down to a dull roar.

As you may or may not be aware, I post my entries to this blog using Ecto (Shareware, $17.95, or ¥2,030). I started using it back when it was Kung-Log, and bought it when it (deservedly) went commercial. It is a great blogging tool, and version 2 for the Mac is now out. (For PC users, version 1.5 has been released, but I won’t be commenting on it.)

There is a fairly radical interface change, and I’m not sure that I like it, although my distaste might come more from having to re-learn the interface rather than from real problems with it. In the new interface, the blogging window becomes secondary (it had been primary), and the entries list becomes the new central window. There is an advantage here in that you can now have more than one blogging window open at the same time. Maybe it makes sense, but it takes getting used to.

Another change is the addition of a “Rich Text” view for the blogging window; you can switch between the classic HTML interface and the “Rich Text” interface, which I guess, as it states, shows the page as if it were read as an RTF file. However, the rich text view is not WYSIWYG to the web page like the preview window is, and when you create special HTML in the HTML view and then switch back to rich text, if Ecto doesn’t recognize the HTML, it will erase it. I lost about 2 minute’s of hand-typed table code that way. Solution: never go into rich text view, which makes it more or less useless. Ecto would be much better if there were a “Preview”-like view, which shows exactly how the page would render on a browser, but you could type directly into it–more like Composer in Mozilla has.

Other than that, there’s little to grouse about. Oh, it would be nice if all the HTML shortcut keys worked in rich text mode, or if you could use shortcut keys to switch blogs while looking at the Entries & Drafts window, but those are minor. The new version does have some good improvements. First off, the Preview window works a bit better–it used to have lots of trouble displaying changes while you were typing in the blogging window, but now it works a bit more smoothly–not perfectly, but better. There is also a preview pane below the entries list now, allowing you to quickly see the post from the past you are about to open.

And there’s the addition of the Amazon.com link creation engine. Let’s say you’re typing a blog entry and you mention a book or a video. You’re an Amazon Associate, which means that if you link to an Amazon product and someone buys that product through your link, you get a share. But to make the link, you have to go to the Amazon site, find the product, get the ASIN or ISBN code, go to the Associates’ pages, go through a multi-step process and then copy and paste the link back into your blog entry. Not exactly a snap. With the new Ecto, you just select the title of the product you typed and execute the keyboard shortcut COMMAND-SHIFT-A. A search window appears for the item on Amazon.com; select the product type and search. When you see the product you want, just double-click on it and Ecto makes the link for you (after you entered your associate ID in the options, of course). This takes a really cumbersome process and makes it easy–a great feature. (See my last post for an example of this; it would’ve taken a lot longer to do this under the old system.)

But there’s another new feature I also like: the ability to simultaneously post to more than one blog at a time. I often post the same entry in this blog and over at the Expat (if it’s political), and before, Ecto made me wait until it was finished uploading to one blog before I could even see the other blog. That seems to have been fixed, a welcome addition.

There are a few other minor touches–more menus and buttons, some more options than before. But before this upgrade, Ecto was already the best blogging tool out there, now it’s just that much better.

I just woke up to a few hundred blog comment spam, and though a few had common attributes–IP Addresses and URLs–most were simple, meaningless text strings with varied, faked IP Addresses and not even a URL, name, or anything in common. Completely useless to any spammer whatsoever. And I almost had no common element to erase them all in one swipe with MT-Blacklist, meaning I would have to resort to deleting them one by one–a process which could take more than an hour. Not exactly an enticing proposition. But fate rescued me: the unspeakable moron who mega-spammed me used one common element–which I reported earlier, but Paul reminded me that I should probably not announced it–and it was in every spam. So I did have one common element to shovel the freshly-laid manure out, after all. But it was close–had the slimeball not used that one little thing, I’d have been in for a hellish hour of staring at spam.

And it’s not just this morning. I have been getting an increasing amount of this kind of spam, probably from the same lowlifes, almost every day now, with many emails bearing no URLs, mention of a company or web site name, or anything else of value to a spammer. It’s as if they simply want to wear me down, make me so sick of deleting spam that I give up and let everything stay, including their links. These people are unspeakable pieces of human garbage. Imagine someone coming to your home, every morning before dawn, and stapling ads to the front of your house until its covered with them, and it’s legal and there’s little you can do to stop them aside from just taking down the ads.

I’ve been putting it off, but that comment registration system is going up as soon as I get the time. I just pray to God they haven’t found a way to hack that, too.

My last post got a comment which seemed legit at first, pointing out that I had been mentioned in a Daily Kos diary. When I checked my stats, it indeed seems that I was mentioned–but the link did not lead to any real story. That means that the story which referenced me was deleted for some reason–or this was perhaps one of the most clever spam attacks I have experienced.

Already I am pretty sure that the comment itself was spam: the link was to a commercial news site, and the text was terse and standardized enough to seem automated–it mentioned my “research,” which is an awkward way of referring to what I wrote, but is general enough to apply to a wide variety of situations. Not to mention that what I wrote wasn’t much as “research” goes. And the compliment “Great work” is a classic standard in spam comments. So I get the impression that spammers are now scouring the popular sites for links to individual blogs, and leaving spam links to themselves in the form of notifications about how people have been mentioned on popular sites. Pretty clever just at that, you have to admit: such links will be appreciated by bloggers, who like to know when they get mentioned somewhere else, especially somewhere in the spotlight. They usually won’t question that kind of comment, and won’t delete it as spam. So the link gets preserved instead of deleted, and that’s a great plus for the spammer.

But the broken link to the Daily Kos diary makes me wonder if there ever was a Daily Kos link to my page in the first place. How many Daily Kos diaries get deleted like that? Maybe it was just that, but my recent headaches with referral spam suggested something different. Referral spam can pretend that people are coming to your site from a link that does not exist. They simply tell your referral logs, “I’m coming from this address,” and your logs accept it. Which means that the 39 visits from the Daily Kos address could just as easily have been referral spam generated by the same entity that spammed the comment. If that is the case, and I’m not just being overly paranoid, you would have a combination spam that would generate a very convincing illusion of legitimacy to a blogger.

I’ll have to keep my eyes open to see if this kind of thing occurs elsewhere. In the meantime, the comment still stands, though the spam link has been removed.

I found out where all the referral spam is coming from, by the way. Curious, I followed one of the links to the people who are spamming the living hell out of me, and lo, it led me to a page which contained almost every single spammer on my list. Their individual sites appear different from each other at first glance, but a quick investigation reveals that they are all linked through the mother site. It’s all the same company. And the name of these lowlifes is “Burnham.”

More specifically, “Burnham Internet Sales.” Not a chance that I am linking to them, of course. But by mentioning their name in this entry, maybe some people will be routed here by the search engines so they can hear about what scum these lowlifes are.

Last month, they spammed my site over 4000 times. Just in the first week of this month, their spam is all over my referral pages again (the referral pages are password-protected, so no, I don’t encourage them that way). When I blocked them with a .htaccess file, they were deterred for all of one day, after which they started spamming me again full-force–meaning that they have people checking on how successfully they spam, and when they see themselves blocked, they take direct action to ram right through the block and spam the site anyway.

They are by far the most egregiously obnoxious referral spammers I have yet heard of. And you’ll love this: on the contact page of all of their domains, they actually have the gall to print:

Due to the fact that there are people who want to ruin the internet by harvesting e-mail address from website for sending spam we have been forced to use a contact form.

Isn’t that just precious? The worst spammers on the net whining about others trying to ruin things for them. What scum-sucking rodents these people are.

Here is their contact information:

Burnham Internet Sales
2793 Bechelli Lane
Redding, California 96002
Phone: 877-430-3716
Fax: 530-221-2321

Don’t buy any damned thing from them at all. No matter what.

Query: Does anyone know a good forum, a discussion page where all types of spam can be talked about? I have searched all over for such a place and cannot find one–but I would think it would be a no-brainer, that several such forums should exist. And yet, none show up on searches. If you know of any place like that, please leave a comment pointing to it. Thanks!

And they’re back. The referral spammers, that is. After less than 24 hours of being shut out by the .htaccess script, they’re back in business. The comment spammers are back as well; the logs show them trying to access the mt-comments.cgi, getting bumped, then going into real posts, and finally ending up with the renamed comments script. And now they’re hitting full force again.

I ask anyone who knows: how can a referral for a URL be left on a site when that URL is blocked by htaccess? Furthermore, I block IP addresses in the same script, and the in my activity log I see the very same IP address hit my site minute by minute. They act as if the htaccess script just isn’t there, blowing right past it. How can that happen, and more to the point, how can it be stopped?

I hope I didn’t fall prey to a spammer posing as a commenter–someone posing as a kindred spam-sufferer asked for the sample of the htaccess script I wrote just a few hours before the script got bypassed… I may have been had.

Ah… I finally found a way to format the .htaccess file which is keeping out the referral spammers. Sure, I’ll have to keep an eye on them and maintain the .htaccess file almost daily, but then the blog already requires a certain level of maintenance, and this isn’t much more.

If you’re interested in knowing the correct formatting for the file and how to execute it, leave a comment with an email addressed (masked by any URL) and I’ll email you a copy of what I have.

Now on to renaming the comments script to keep out the comment spammers–less of a hassle concerning the fact that MT-Blacklist is already keeping them off the site proper, though it’ll be nice to see the stats for the comments file drop below 400 hits a day, knowing that they are 98% spammers.

Update: …aaaand I just executed the major points of advice for comment spam listed on this page, and took a snapshot of the stats. Now time will tell if they work.

I haven’t had a chance to rename my comments script yet, and since I removed the .htaccess block on the script (due to many legitimate visitors being blocked) and I have not found a .htaccess script to keep referral spam out, spammers have had open access to both areas–though MT-Blacklist has done a great job of keeping out 99% of the comment spammers. Still, it’s not nearly enough.

The primary damage is to the access logs, which thanks to the spam are completely meaningless. There have been over 6000 hits on the comments script in two weeks, meaning 430 attempts are made to access the comments on any given day–and at most, I get 10 legitimate comments a day. My blog activity log shows the hundreds that are blocked every day. This bloats the number of counted visitors to the comments script, but probably not too much the number of total unique visitors, because they tend to use one IP address to spam with. When I had successfully blocked their access to the script, the number of spam that arrived were almost nil, but the daily visit numbers did not change much.

The referral spam, however, is another story. They must use IP spoofing a lot more. It used to be that one, maybe two or three referral spammers would show up in the top-25 logs, hitting my site maybe a dozen or two times a month. But now the top-25 list is nothing but spammers, the least of which has deposited 86 fake hits on my site. The worst by far is some place called “Burnhams” which by different referring URLs within their main site have hit me 351 times. The top 25 referrers have hit me a total of 2,691 times. 85 of the top 100 referrers are spammers, totaling about 4,000 hits. And the month is only half over.

I have got to get on top of this. It’s not just the destruction of my referral logs, it’s the principle of never giving a spammer a break.

If anyone out there knows of a way to purge access logs of identifiable spammers, I’d appreciate a tutorial…. this would, without a doubt, be a popular new piece of software. Something with a simple interface which would scan the logs and present a list of all referrers, with a check-box by each one; check the boxes next to spammers and click “delete and block,” and the script would edit out the hits made by each one and modify the .htaccess file to keep them out, then allow AwStats to recalculate the logs; maybe a central blacklist of referral spammers could be kept and updated. In other words, something like MT-Blacklist for referral spam. Maybe I’m asking for the impossible, maybe it would just be too much work to keep it up, for too little return.

But for me, it would be sweet.

Here’s a great testimonial by Kevin Drum, one of the top political bloggers, on switching from Internet Explorer to Firefox. He hits on several of the major reasons to use Firefox: tabbed browsing, far greater security, long-standing pop-up blocking support (not just-added), greater speed, and ease of installation.

He notes cons as being that not all web pages work well with Firefox–but this is something that will change over time as more and more people make the switch he just did.

A small note: PC users who now use Firefox now understand, to a small degree, what it’s like to have a Mac–being more cutting-edge, and having better quality and features–but having to deal with people designing things for the other guys more than for you because everyone else is going for the herd-mentality me-too option. Everyone should be using Firefox because IE is such a drastically inferior product–but most people don’t want to take the two minutes it takes to download Mozilla or Firefox, and would rather use IE just because Microsoft put it on their desktop.

Wake up, IE users. Download Firefox, or Mozilla for the full suite (email, newsgroups, address book, chat, web page construction in addition to browsing). It’s free, it’s better, it’s safer, and it makes a hell of a lot more sense. So why are you still using the POS you have? Go on, do it!

Well, I thought I had a great way of keeping spammers at bay, with the .htaccess file. As it turns out, I also seem to be keeping out most of the legitimate visitors as well; reports have come back from helpful visitors that sometimes even access to the comments themselves is restricted. Damn. Well, the .htaccess is gone, so now there should be a lot more visitors leaving comments again… as well as a flood of spammers.

Time to start looking into MT 3.0 and comment registration again.

Update: …aaaand within just a few hours, spam starts rolling in. Ah, well. Meanwhile, the referral spamming cockroaches are crawling into the site at full force; more than 600 such spams in five days, more than any other time before.

Ever since I put in the spammer-block on my mt-comments script file, I’ve had a drop-off in comments, and am beginning to wonder if it doesn’t have anything to do with the script. I have been getting comments, and all experiments with various people I’ve asked to post comments have been successful. However, one person who has my email address has noted that he had a problem commenting here from Firefox–though I tested the browser on my PC and was able to get through myself. Anyone else who can’t get a comment through can’t reach me, so I’d be unable to hear about problems like that.

The easy way would be to have an active email address for this site posted, but spammers would get it and drown me in spam (I tested that before). So here’s what I’d like to try:

I will post a comment myself to this entry. I will use a new, unique email address that I can throw away later if it get spammed. It should be protected by the spam block feature in the link (this will be a good test of that as well).

If you have tried commenting to this site before and were blocked, then get the email address from the first comment to this post and send me an email letting me know if there’s a problem.

Thanks for your help!