PB blog: IT stuff, ogame and various

Texas Holdem Spam

I’m getting trackback spam from the “texas holdem poker” guy since a while now.

Abstract: in this post I’ll explain you how to get rid of comments spam if you are using WordPress for your blog.

First of all, if you get the “texas holdem poker” sh*t, you are probably getting a lot of comments from other “visitors”. Install the Captcha! plugin to get rid of 90% of them. Captcha is a system that generates an image containing random characters: people have to correctly write what they see in the image in order for their comment to be accepted.

You can do as I did: test Captcha! for a few days. You’ll notice that the spam will lowe, but not the texas holdem and the other trackback comments. To block trackback comments you need something more powerful: try the Spam Karma 2 plugin (SK2).

SK2 seems more difficult to configure but you can try to use the default settings, as I am doing. In my General Settings I modified only the following:

• Severity: “Kinda Mean”… and the spam is automatically caught
• Simple Digest - Strength: “Disabled”… as I hate to get e-mails for every spam that I get.

In my Recent Spam Harvest, as I had hundreds of comments i modified the following:

• Purge comments older than: “30 days”.

That’s it. Captcha! will catch 90% of your spam, Spam Karma 2 will get the remaining. Try to play with the SK2 settings if it filters also the genuine comments of your innocent visitors. Good luck.

Edit 3.3.2006: I uninstalled Captcha! because of one single reason, accessibility. I still get a lot of spam, which is detected and removed by Spam Karma. Thus why should I annoy people that want to comment on my blog with Captchas?

spam

sping

texas holdem poker

December 19, 2005, Category: IT stuff

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Scammers and spam

I don’t receive a lot of spam: in my spam folder of my yahoo account I have only 17 spam mails since may, 21st. 17 spams in a month. More or less one spam every 2 days. It’s very low, isn’t it? Spammers are stopping to spam, or did I protect enough my e-mail address?

My public e-mail address is published in my personal website and can be accessed by everybody. I keep it public, because it’s an alias from yahoo’s address guard. If I’m getting too much spam, I can easily erase that alias and create a new one. It ill take some time to be found again.

Anyway, I have to add that I miss some spam, really. I hated spam, but now that I receive nothing more than a mail every 2 days it’s like that I miss something.

Spam was part of my youth years. I remember when I was using crappy hotmail: I was getting a lot of shitty spam every day. Proposals about:

• viagra
• dental prothesis
• fake diplomas
• penis enlargements
• grow your hair
• become rich
• meeting girls
• etc.

I wish that I could remember the other shitty and funny stuff we were receiving… now the spam proposals have changed a little bit, let’s take a look at the shit I have in my actual spam folder:

• 5 mails are of the most shitty service on the web (besides hotmail, of course): sms.ac (invitation to join that shitty spamming service); of these 5 emails, 2 come from one person, the other 2 from another person, 1 from another. This shit keeps coming till I click to join their fucking network. I should just join in order to stop that fucking spam? sms.ac: go fuck yoursel, die and burn in the hell mutherfuckers!!!!!!!!!
• 2 different mails advertise the same product: "horny pills" and "cialis". Oh yeah, also viagra…
• 1 mail from Brazil
• 1 mail from Germany
• 4 are not spam but ended in my spam folder… nothing important: a forum notification; a newsletter that I don’t remember to have subscribed, coming from a forum I have subscribed to; a gmail account creation confirmation; a spam from AIESEC
• 2 mails appearently from different people, selling the same product, one mail has the subject "Microsoft Office 2003 - 75% OFF" which include a list of good prices for retail versions of software. Search in google for "oem cd shop", you’ll find it. It’s pirated software, not OEM like they say in the website… If I want to get a pirated copy i don’t need to buy one for 99$, for a pirated copy I can simply leech what I want (for free( from edonkey or bittorrent… stupid idiots, but even more stupids are the people that buy these copies…
• and now, the best ones, the most recent type of spam, also called "scamming"… I will not copy and paste their text here, because it’s really waste of space… I will summarize: a scammer tells you an interesting and sad story, mostly they tell you that they are blocked somewhere in the world (a poor country, where they are improsoned -but strangely they could fine a computer connected to internet, find YOU, and write you that email…), they tell you that a relative of them died and they can not get the money, so they ask you to get the money on your bank account, and then to give it to them. Of coure, they will give you a high percentage for the service… very very funny, funny to think that some people will believe to these idiots and eventually lose their money, because it’s a fraud.

For more information about scamming, check the links in my other article about scamming on ebay (it’s in Italian, but don’t worry, just check the links).

That’s it, i just wanted to remember what was part of my life. Stupid spam. I hope that my cellular phone number will never become spammed.

E-mail spam: enjoy it

June 23, 2005, Category: IT stuff

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Important websites not accessible in several languages

I think that this is a marketing or engineering decision, anyway -OMO- it SUCK. All well done programs have an option to change the language of the interface.

Google is available in more than 80 languages. Google.ch is available in the 4 Official spoken languages in Switzerland: German, French, Italian and Rumantsch + in English (I use the English version)!

This is a problem affecting a lot of international websites and web services. What I like is the Google approach. At the moment, Gmail is available only in English, but it will be soon available in more than 80 languages, as for the search engine.

Let’s take another example: Yahoo is available in USA, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, India… but it you register to yahoo.com, the interface is available only in English. If you register to Yahoo.it, it’s available only in Italian… this SUCKS!

For ebay it’s the same. As Swiss, I hate to browse ebay.ch in GERMAN (I understand it, i spoke it a bit, but I HATE German!!!). I like English, i have Windows XP in English, even if Italian is my mother tongue and even if in a program I can use Italian, i prefear to use English as language for the interfaces. So, I’d like to browse ebay.ch in English, at least.

I wrote a message in the ebay forums about the translations problem, if you are interested.

Amazon is another example of bad designed platform. Amazon.de is the best choice to buy a book, because shipping from amazon.de to Switzerland is free. It’s not the case if i order from amazon.fr or even worse, from amazon.com. So why should I use it in German? I can buy English books, but the interface is in German, this sucks!

Oh, I almost forgot to say that everything would be easier if everybody would know Enlglish, besides his/her mother tongue. If this could be true, it would be so easy to make all important websites accessible to everybody: one translation in the official language and a second one, in English, for the rest of the world.

May 6, 2005, Category: IT stuff

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