Schonhose

Over the last few months several threads have been posted on the Pixelpost forum regarding SPAM comments. In some of these threads the author boldly claims that Pixelpost isn’t stopping any SPAM. Well, since December 28th, 2006 I have installed a SPAMlog addon on my blog. Basically, what this addon does is keeping track if and why a comment is blocked.

First I think I have to elaborate on my settings, so here they are. I use the <TOKEN> setting from Pixelpost, along with a 30 seconds SPAMflood protection setting and a maximum of three URLS in a comment. Besides that I use the http://BL addon (more info about this addon) and I have installed Defensio addon for Pixelpost.

So now we know the configuration let’s show some stats from the last 743 days shall we?

It seems my photoblog received a total of 31897 comments (43 comments per day). A total of 2457 comments actually made it through the defensive lines of both Pixelpost and the http://BL addon. Defensio managed to catch 2256 comments as SPAM, so this leaves out 201 comments. It turns out that 70 of these comments were SPAM, but these slipped through before the Defensio addon was installed (The Defensio addon was installed a few months after the initialization of the SPAMlog).

These are the numbers, but what happened to the initial 31897 – 2457 = 29440 comments which were blocked by both Pixelpost and the http://BL addon?

Let me break that number down: Pixelpost internal measures took care of 17194 of these comments while the http://BL addon took care of the other 12246 comments. Basically this says that the measures in Pixelpost are capable of catching at least 50% of all SPAM comments.

So what is the internal Pixelpost method that stops most of the SPAM?

• 887 comments contained words listed in ban or moderation list
• 10379 comments used an incorrect token
• 2 commenters waited too long before posting (30 minutes)
• 156 comments were posted to rapidly in succession (SPAM flood)
• 5403 comments contained too many URLs (3)
• 114 comments contained an URL on the blacklist
• 210 comments were not allowed (commenting disabled)
• 41 commenters used an invalid e-mail address

As can be seen the token protection is responsible for 60% of the SPAM stopped by Pixelpost own defensive measures. Feel free to comment on my analysis.

John Godley over at UrbanGiraffe.com has released the updated DrainHole plugin, which is compatible with WordPress 2.7. This means the downloads are up again! Happy leeching everyone!

At the end of November I blogged about my idea of taking 40 of the highest rated images and turning it into a book. In the post I have described a method for selecting the highest rated images but there were some flaws in my reasoning.

So I took another approach, which is much easier. Let’s assume everyone who has visited my photoblog has voted, but (and this is it) people who didn’t vote actually voted zero stars. In other words, they didn’t found the picture worth at least 1 star. When we assume this, the selection of the images becomes easier because now we only have to select the pictures with the highest total. But to narrow the selection a bit down I have included another rule: an image must have at least 5 votes to participate. Perhaps you’re wondering why I enforce this rule? The reason is quite simple. This way I know at least 5 people found the image good enough to give a rating between 1 – 5 stars.

Furthermore, whenever there is a situation in which two or more images have the same total rating the image with the least votes will be given the highest ranking.

For those of you wondering what the SQL looks like (you do need to have the AjaxRatings addon installed and I assume the prefix of the tables is “pixelpost_“) I have it included below. As can be seen I also let the statement I used earlier (weighted ratings) in the SQL for comparison:

SELECT
`pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`img_id`, `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`total_value`,
`pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`total_votes`,`pixelpost_pixelpost`.`headline`,
`pixelpost_pixelpost`.`body`, `pixelpost_pixelpost`.`image`,
((`total_rate`/5)*`total_votes`) as weighedRating
FROM `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`,`pixelpost_pixelpost`
WHERE `pixelpost_pixelpost`.`id` = `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`img_id`
ORDER BY `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`total_value` DESC, `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`total_votes` ASC
LIMIT 0,41


So, how does this look compared to my earlier approach? Well, the top 30 of my images stayed the same, some images shifted a bit but there were no real surprises. At the bottom of the list there were some small changes which has surprised me a bit. For instance: on number 37 (at the time of this post) was the Mosaic image I created containing the 200 images I had on my blog at that time. I’m not sure if I have a high resolution of the image lying around somewhere. In case I don’t I have chosen to omit this file.

Anyway, have a peek at the current output of the script.

I’ve updated two Pixelpost addons today. The first addon I updated is the Clickable Tags Addon. Thanks to Jay Williams (visit his photoblog) the code has been cleaned up a bit and the Javascript has been updated.

The second update concerns the Entrypage addon. The update includes the possibility to set additional URL parameters. This might come in handy if you would like to redirect your visitors to a paged archive.

Enjoy!

Finally the (long awaited) update for the Defensio addon for Pixelpost is here. As mentioned in this blogpost earlier it contains the fix that slowed down a lot of photoblogs earlier this month.

Thanks to Carl Mercier of the Defensio team I was able to add one more bugfix. Carl was looking at the logs over at Defensio and noticed that sometimes the article-date is not passed to the service. The date is a required parameter and from the very first version I made sure the addon passed it along with the other variables.

This was kind of odd since it was clearly a Pixelpost blog and the date was not passed. I have to say I was stumped on this one, but Carl managed to figure it out. The Defensio addon allows comments to be posted on images that don’t exists yet. Once we (Carl) identified the problem a fix was a matter of a few lines. If the article-date is not in the database, the Defensio addon will throw a nice 404 error.

So there you have it, the best just got better!

I have been using the services provided by Project Honeypot for sometime now, hoping to stop comment spam and email harvesting. I even wrote an addon so it can be used on Pixelpost Photoblogs. Today I received an email from Project Honeypot, it seems that one of my honeypots has caught its first unique harvester nobody has ever seen before.

Regardless of how the rest of your day goes, here’s something to be happy
about — today a honey pot you installed successfully identified a
previously unknown email harvester (IP: 41.251.10.177).

For those of you who are unaware of what an harvester is, a nice explanation is given by Project Honeypot in their FAQ:

A harvester is a computer program that surfs the internet looking for email addresses. Harvesting email addresses from the Internet is the primary way spammers build their lists. Harvesters must connect to the Internet through an IP address. Project Honey Pot publishes the list of the top IP addresses used by harvesters.

If you want to join this project there are several addons for WordPress and, as mentioned earlier, there is even one for Pixelpost!