Well, I was a little off in my guess about how long it would take, but I just received spam — a PayPal phishing scam — at the hyperlinked address I made up. Still nothing on the text-only link. The address has now been blocked and I’ve removed the link and address from the previous e-mail.
I’m putting an e-mail address in plain text and hyperlinked in this post as a little experiment to see how quickly I begin receiving spam at that address. I’m guessing it’ll happen within the first week.
spam-exp-text@beauvais1.com
[E-mail address blocked and hyperlink removed once it received spam.]
I’ll report back with the findings. Until then, try not to fall off the edges of your seats; I know this is pretty exciting stuff. Wow, what a lame excuse for a post after two months of silence.
To those who use my RSS feed, sorry for the sudden rush of “new” posts. The WordPress v2.0 upgrade apparently changed the feed URL a bit making all posts look new. Shouldn’t happen again. (Until the next time. ;-))
I just completed the upgrade to the new WordPress 1.5 and am liking it a lot. Prior to the upgrade I was worried about converting my old style to the new theme system, but the new default theme is so much nicer than what I had that I’m really not planning to change it much at all.
There are some new changes in the comment system which I hope will help to reduce the number of comment and trackback spams that I have to moderate. (Averaging about 15-30 per day.) As part of that, I have enabled the option to require an e-mail address for all comment posters. That address will never be displayed publicly and I give you my word that I will never, ever spam you or give/sell/trade the address to anyone else! If this doesn’t work, I’ll require commenters to register/login and will disable unregistered commenting.
Okay, I have to admit, I’m a little confused now. The comment spam that I’ve been getting recently — mostly for online poker and gambling sites or “enhancement” drugs — has one thing in common. It uses strange sentence fragments about nothing in particular, with hyperlinks interspersed throughout to gambling or drug sites. While annoying as hell, at least I can see the twisted logic in it.
The logic behind the thirty-nine comment spams that I just moderated into the great bit bucket in the sky, however, eludes me entirely. The posts were all from [random_characters]@[random_characters].com, and all the links were to “http://[random_characters].com/.” No two domains or hyperlinks were the same, and none of the domains actually exist on the Internet.
So I ask… what, aside from annoying the crap out of Webmasters and site admins around the world, is the point of this type of spam? The best I can figure is it’s a probe to seek out vulnerable sites that will make easy targets for real spam attacks in the days to come. If anyone has a better idea, I’d love to hear it. In the meantime, I’ll be reading up on some of the anti-comment spam plugins that are available for WordPress.
As an interesting aside, almost all of the spam I’ve received in the last month has originated from IP addresses assigned to broadband companies such as Comcast and Adelphia. (Comcast is, by far, the worst offender.) Most are based in the U.S., but there are a few from the Netherlands, the U.K., and a couple other European nations. No doubt the work of spyware turning peoples’ machines into helpless zombies to be used for sending out this trash.
I finally got around to updating WordPress to the latest release version. At the moment, the mobile version of the site isn’t up, but I’ll try to get that fixed in a couple hours. If you notice any problems or broken posts/links, please let me know by either replying to this post or by sending an e-mail to “comments” at this site’s domain.
Update 1: The RSS feeds don’t seem to work in NewsGator. Not sure what’s up with that just yet.
Update 2: RSS feeds fixed. Here are some details about the fix. Amazing what a single hyphen can do…
Update 3: The mobile version of the site is now back, though it’s not working as well as the previous version. Instead of a single post, it’s displaying the first ten posts, which isn’t exactly mobile-friendly. Thanks to Alex King for his great WordPress Mobile Edition plug-in! After some sleep, I’ll take a look at the code and see if I can get it back to displaying only a single post per page.
I would also like to note that I love the plug-in architecture in the new WordPress. There’s now very little code modification to do in order to add features to the site.
Update 4: I removed the Mobile Edition plug-in because it’s behaving very oddly. (Strange duplicate navigation links, links that don’t work, etc.) Instead, I’m working on a style sheet for mobile devices. I know that not all mobile devices understand cascading style sheets, but from what I can tell from my server logs, nobody is viewing this site with a mobile phone and AvantGo traffic has almost ceased entirely. (Not surprising given the fact that I often go a month or more between updates.) 
Due to extremely excessive comment spamming in the last twenty–four hours, I’ve enabled comment moderation. I want everyone to feel free to post comments to anything on my site, but comments will no longer be displayed publicly until I’ve approved them. Real comments will always be approved, but spam will be deleted. This means that I still have to deal with the spam, but at least it will never show up publicly. I wish I understood why people feel the need to do this crap.
For those of you who read my site primarily via an RSS reader, I have a question for you: When an image appears in a post — as in the "Spyware screenshot" post — does it show up in your RSS reader? I use NewsGator and images now show up fine for me. They didn’t in the past, however, and a friend of mine said they aren’t showing up properly for him, either.
If you wouldn’t mind, please leave a comment for this post to let me know if
Anonymous comments are welcome; there’s no need to register or even provide a real name or e-mail address unless you want me to reply via e-mail for some reason. Thanks!
Well, I’ve just had to delete my first comment spam. If this becomes a trend — as I’m certain it will, based on other sites — I’m going to either turn on comment moderation or disable comments entirely. Spammers are ruining yet another aspect of the Internet with their useless, unwanted, and entirely unsolicited trash.
Oh, and to the assholes who write comment spamming software, please hop on the first express flight to hell. It’s one thing to send spam via e-mail to people, but when you start using other peoples’ Web sites to promote whatever it is you’re trying to get people to buy, that takes wrong to an entirely new level. I am not your damn billboard.
I’ve been asked a couple times why the dates on my site are displayed the way they are. I use ISO 8601 for writing dates because it removes any ambiguity and eliminates confusion between the various common regional and international formats. YYYY-MM-DD is also logical for sorting and categorizing data using computers. I use a 24-hour time format, but tend to use my local time zone rather than UTC. The linked document above goes into detail about why ISO 8601 exists and why it’s a good idea to use it.