While I tend to disagree with the idea of manipulating search engine results. I think Juggling DB has a point. If people were to refer to jugglingdb more often on online articles, especially in the same sentence as the word “juggling”, hopefully they will be able to depose the now unmaintained juggling dot org from the top spot in google.
You may or may not have spotted that this post exists purely as an attempt to help influence Google. Apologies for the interruption to normal service. It will be resumed, presumably, sometime.
I’ve found that half the time I don’t know something and feel that I really ought to know and so I’d better not ask because it would show that I hadn’t been listening, in fact there is no reason I ought to know, and I should have asked and saved a lot of agonising.
I’ve also found that half the time I ask about something I don’t know, it turns out to be something I’ve been told a dozen times and my asking has merely served to irritate those around me and in the subsequent turmoil I forget the answer all over again.
Now if I could work on knowing which unknowns are which, and start asking about the ones I shouldn’t know and not asking about the ones I should…
I don’t necessarily subscribe to the ideas of Biorhythms, Astrology, or “Lunacy”, but there are unquestionably cycles that I go round, wherein I get tantalisingly close to being productive then sort of shake myself to bits with my own momentum and can’t achieve anything for days or weeks.
Actually, my de-spam concept is working well for me. Bulk Edit only lets you do 20 at a time, though it could be tweaked easily enough.
… or you could use Mass Edit Mode… d’oh.
Rather than using the Edit -> Awaiting Moderation menu item, use Edit -> Comments. Click Mass Edit Mode, then enter your search term in the Search box.
I wonder if I kept the receipt for last night..?
I spent tonight working on a patch for wordpress 1.2.2 to add a more powerful delete function to comments. You can search on simple criteria (Name contains a or b or c but not d or e or f, and post contains g or h or i but not j or k or l)
It’s not very thoroughly tested, having existed for about 2 hours, but I have it installed and it’s been working a treat so far.
To use, go to
http://www.sweavo.34sp.com/downloads/
grab the despam… .zip or .tgz, and unzip it somewhere. The wp-admin directory contains some replacement and one additional file for your wp-admin directory. Once the files are present on the server, you’ll hae a new option under the Edit menu called de-spam. Enter your criteria and hit Preview, then when you’re happy that only the posts you want to get rid of are red, hit Delete These Posts.
O, and either (a) have taken a backup of your comments table or (b) don’t come crying to me!
Let me know if you use it and it’s rubbish in any way. Apart from the fact it looks ropey. I wasn’t going flat out for looks.
What is comment spam? It’s a long and not very interesting story, but if you suffer from it you may gain some small comfort from knowing why it happens. Or at least some of it, cos there’s a new type I’ve just started receiving, which mystifies me too at the moment. But on with the knowns:
I’ve been getting a lot of comments submitted to my blog with some rambling text and a link to a certain texas poker site. The rambling text is not designed to draw me to click on the site, it’s more subtle than that. The rambling text performs two functions: (1) it makes it less obvious to me that the post is just posted by an automated script rather than a person, and (2) makes it look less like a meaningless link to Google.
A top spot on Google’s search results is a very valuable advertising commodity, so naturally, uh, ‘enterprising’ businesspersons will seek, uh, ‘creative’ ways to get up on the top spot. They might be ‘enterprising’ and ‘creative’ but these folk are not stupid. They study how google rates and sorts its results. A major factor Google uses is weighting a page by the number of other pages that link to it.
The submitter of these comments is hoping that you’ve not got moderation turned on, and that you just leave the comments lying around on the web. That way, when google’s indexer wanders past your site, it counts - oo look, 157 contributors to this site all refered to such-a-site, I guess that makes it a pretty authoritative site on whatever subject it’s on then.
By turning on moderation it’s easy enough to stop the spammer (a) mussing up your comments and (b) profiting from (a). It’s less easy to delete all the offending submissions from your moderation panel in wordpress.
How to stop these spams getting in there in the first place? Bro has suggested a simple obstacle that will currently stop automated scripts from posting spam. It’s a secret mechanism protection which works for now but can’t be published, since then it won’t be a secret! (Secret mechanism protection is regarded as bad cryptography: good cryptography uses a publicly-known technique and a secret key. Of course Bro knows all this, but while it’s not publicly known, it works, and we’re not hiding the crown jewels here!)
The mysterious spams I’m now getting are simply compliments on my Spitfire blog. They are mysterious because they are just short complementary comments like “Great site! Thanks!” or “I like what you have done especially with the layout and design” and NO HYPERLINKS. This is a bit of a mystery to me. Any ideas?
Well, after much umming and ahh-ing and hoping against hope that my Palm Vx was not in fact on its last legs despite clearly being held together with micropore tape, I went ahead and bought a tungsten c, with a natty little integral keyboard.
When my fingers are properly calloused I think it will be a boon!
In other news, I have my site set to moderate all comments, in case you are wondering why it takes a while for your comments to appear. This is because the alternative is to have to put up with hundreds of posts advertising texas hold’em poker, which I suspect is less than ideal.
I own a pair of Teflon trousers. I’m wearing them right now. The idea is that they don’t stain cos the teflon-coated thread repels liquids. I just put my glass in the sink and felt a cold seeping sensation down my leg. Instinctively my hand went to the place but I found my trousers to be dry.
I’d managed to spill some cold water INTO my pocket!
As the eponymous young lion learned, in Johnny Lion’s Rubber Boots: rubber boots don’t just keep water OUT, they also keep it IN.
Gave my first salsa class last night. It went really well! Hopefully it was good for the class too and they’ll keep coming back. The first half of the lesson plan went really quickly, so I was worried I’d run out of material to teach them, but then when we got into partner work it all started to get a bit harder so we ended up using the whole hour and the feedback I got was good. With 43 students I didn’t get round everyone and give them individual help, but I don’t think too many people were feeling too left behind. Watch this space on the next few saturdays!