Posts tagged ‘spam’
The Twitter spam challenge
March 29th, 2012 at 11:26 pm by Dr. Drang
I loved this article on Twitter spam reporting by Ryan Irelan from a few days ago, and not just because it showed Dr. Twoot to be the most efficient. As Ryan says at the top of the post, Twitter spam is a big problem. Post a tweet that contains popular keywords (“iPad”, “iPhone”) and it’s…
Your writing style has been surprised me
November 16th, 2011 at 5:30 pm by Dr. Drang
I wouldn’t have comments on the site if it weren’t for Akismet, which does an excellent job of filtering out the spam. But it isn’t perfect, and today I noticed a spam comment that got through the filter and had to be reclassified by hand. After telling WordPress that the comment was spam, I clicked…
Google spreadsheet phishing
September 5th, 2011 at 7:54 pm by Dr. Drang
Sometime last week I got an email that seemed like an obvious phishing attack. I wasn’t in the mood to track it down, so I just classified it as spam and moved on. Today I got the same message (may have been from a different sender) and decided to look into it a little further.…
Twitter spam again
August 19th, 2011 at 10:43 pm by Dr. Drang
When I added a simple spam-fighting addition to Dr. Twoot a couple of months ago, a couple of people wondered how effective it would be. So did I. It has just a couple of rules: A tweet is identified as spam if it’s from someone I don’t follow and it contains just my handle and…
Fighting Twitter spam in Dr. Twoot
June 13th, 2011 at 11:36 pm by Dr. Drang
Twitter spam takes many forms, but every spam tweet I’ve gotten in the past couple of weeks has looked like this: @drdrang http://t.co/z5WSLml10:13 PM Mon Jun 13, 2011@drangspam Drang Spam Tester The body of the tweet has been, apart from my handle and some whitespace, just a URL. I’ve been reporting the spammers right away,…
My own code used against me?
February 19th, 2011 at 4:10 pm by Dr. Drang
Despite my battles with Akismet on other sites last year, I’ve always appreciated the good job it does of fending off comment spam here. Not only does it keep almost all the spam out of the comments, it seems to let all the real comments through. Occasionally I take a look in the spam filter…
Released from Akismet prison on a technicality
August 11th, 2010 at 8:11 am by Dr. Drang
(For background see this post and this one. Nutshell: Akismet, the spam filter for WordPress blogs, has for weeks been blocking me from commenting on WP blogs other than my own. My attempts to get Akismet to unblock me have failed.) Yesterday morning I found this message from Akismet in my inbox, a response to…
My continuing battle with Akismet
August 9th, 2010 at 9:30 am by Dr. Drang
Here’s an update on my inability to leave comments on most WordPress blogs. Shorter version: I’m still being screwed by Akismet. Longer version… After that last post, Matthew McVickar—who’s becoming a ubiquitous presence here—gave me administrator access to an unused WordPress 3.0 installation on a server he controls. I tried a handful of commenting permutations…
Email rejections
June 2nd, 2010 at 10:30 am by Dr. Drang
The bulk email I mentioned in this earlier post didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped. The cut-and-pasted encoded PDF attachment—the main topic of the post—was fine, but several of the messages were rejected. The problem was Sendmail and spam. I’d forgotten that when you send an email directly from your own computer using…
