Category: Internet

Maximum WordPress Spam Prevention: Part 2

Anyone who has a public facing blog knows about being bombarded by spam. Recently I got so annoyed I started locking down blog comments after thirty days. After a month or so I realized this was counter productive. Readers could no longer participate, ask questions, etc. so I started searching for a better way to handle my anti-spam measures.

After doing a bunch of research I landed on Askimet. Note, I am not being sponsored by Askimet, I truly did this research on my own. I can say so far the results have been awesome. I’ve been able to turn all blog comments back on, and it’s very rare for a spam comment to sneak through. 99.9999% of the time when that happens it seems that Askimet has already killed the spam by the time I get around to viewing the WordPress spam queue.

Since turning Askimet on I haven’t had to personally deal with 462 spam comments. Yay! In the screenshot below, the 228 spam comments number represents a partial snapshot of the spam that I had to manually delete prior to Askimet.

Spam and Web ads are annoying but much better than TV ads

For now my blog will continue to be ad free. Full disclosure: I’ve had two offers in the last month to expose my visitors to ads. The presumption is that I would make some (albeit small) amount of money. However, I’ve done the homework and know that the advertisers make the big bucks and not the advertisees.

Ads in all forms continue to plague the earth because some surveys consistently show that they work. The math is stark and the math simple. Someone is responding to spam email, even the icky ones. Someone is clicking on those web ads, and someone claims to be watching TV ads and even going so far as saying they are effective. Gasp! I will reluctantly agree that some ads are useful for communicating new products or features, but that doesn’t mean I have to like them.

I recently read about a survey claiming that 53% of online consumers said a TV ad had influenced them to purchase a product or service in the last twelve months. My heart nearly stopped. Yikes! Who are these people? Speaking on behalf of my own brain, it automatically shuts down within 30 milliseconds of an ad starting on TV or Hulu, or YouTube. Sometimes I can barely read a news article because my brain automatically blurs out 3/4’s of the page where presumably the evil ads are lurking.

Here’s a fact. When you watch prime time television you will be brainwashed and turned into a zombie through the constant exposure of 50 – 70 ads per hour. I’ll repeat that in case you missed it: 50 to 70 advertisements in a single hour. I can tell you this with certainty because I sat down one night and decided to convert percentage of ad time per hour into a meaningful number that anyone could understand. If you watch two TV shows back-to-back that’s possibly 100 to 140 ads that have soaked into your sleep addled brain. And, these are the actual ads and the numbers don’t include embedded product placements that are getting increasingly brazen.

After I had a grasp on the level of digital bombardment we were receiving from TV ads, I was able to take some of the full page, online, take-temporary-control-of-the-entire-browser ads with a bit more perspective. I also said a silent praise for DISH Network’s Hopper.

Maybe I’m writing this blog post because an ad told me too.

Bye bye IPv4 and the sooner the better

I was surprised today when I read on BBC that Europe had begun rationing their remaining 16 million IPv4 addresses. What surprised me  was not that we were finally running out, but the fact that I had scanned all the major U.S. headlines today and I didn’t see a peep about it.

The beginning of the end started for real in February of 2011 when IANA issued the final pool of 16 million IPv4 addresses. And, now Europe is dipping into the final bucket.

Well this is a heads-up to all my IT friends since it will eventually affect anyone who works with computers. Internet Protocol is how computers direct traffic to each other both inside the firewall, within your home and out on the public internet. If you haven’t seen an IPv6 address before it looks like this: 1001:0cb9:66b3:0042:1234:8a2e:2851:7334. It’s quite a bit harder to type than IPv4 addresses which look like 192.168.0.1. But…IPv4 allowed for only 4,294,967,296 addresses, which in today’s terms seems quite small for some reason.

So what does all this mean? As of today, it’s not real clear how much of the public, world wide web will work properly using IPv6 TCP/IP requests. There have been reports of major companies enabling IPv6 and there have been some international efforts to promote awareness and cooperation to upgrade. My guess is that for some period of time both IPv4 and IPv6 will have to live side-by-side until the vast majority of routers, phones, computers and servers get upgraded.

One thing is clear that the faster systems get upgraded the smoother the transition will occur.

References

What is IPv6

World IPv6 Launch