Tag Archives: anti-spam

Unexpected benefit

Had someone in the Russian Federation try to brute-force into the website today. As it turns out, the attack was a complete waste. One of the anti-spam measures installed on the website prevented them from seeing anything except an access denied message on the hundred or so attempts to generate my password and hack into the site.

Even if they had generated my password, it still wouldn’t have gone through, because they were blocked prior to the code that would have let them in even processed.

Doubt that the coders of the anti-spam scripts had it in mind, but here’s a big thumbs up to them anyway 🙂

Down with a cold

Been miserable since last night. Constant headache and hard to breathe. I did get a little writing done on Sanctuary, but not much.

I was using a tool, trying to find all the dead links on the blog ( a change a while back broke many of the links in old posts ) and in the process realized that the custom skin and the collapsing archives plug-in were both causing validation errors.

I didn’t check the blog ( or the forum for that matter ) when was validating everything else, because I trusted the big names to have kept the code straight. Should have thought about the third-party apps.

The way the collapsing archives is coded, it would have taken too long to validate for even transitional, and I suspect that WP will switch over to strict soon enough. So, I dumped it. Honestly, I like the dropdown version on there now more anyway. The plug-in was neat, but I also saw potential for confusion from users from the beginning.

The custom skin had all of two simple errors in it, which I quickly fixed.

Managed to find about three of the broken links, and then the validation website crapped out on me :p

I’ll probably try again tomorrow. If nothing else, I can snag some of them from Webmaster Tools crawl errors. I was trying to get ahead of those crawl errors, though.

Signed up for the bing version of analytics as well. It doesn’t require any coding on the website, but it should help my indexing by providing them with the sitemap. Yahoo shares this service, so that takes care of the big three.

Under a major spam attack on the blogs. Someone has a wide range of virgin IPs and emails that aren’t in any of the databases. Fortunately, the second layer of spam protection has been taking care of business. It has the added benefit of capturing the spammy links and allowing me to report them along with the spammer.

Been seeing activity on my contact forms as well. I haven’t set those up to log blocked spammers, so I don’t know if they’re just regular visitors, spammers failing to spam me, or humans trying to figure out the anti-spam protection.

I’m ready to update my custom anti-spam question there with a whole new layer if necessary, although I doubt it will be. Because it doesn’t allow automatic posting through a login, someone is going to have to log all the potential combinations of my anti-spam question in order for a robot to take over.

The custom coding that calls the spam database could also be tightened if necessary.

If nothing else, you can trust me to do everything in my power to prevent spam from getting in front of you on my website. It amuses me to foil them and report them to help out others who might not have the ability to micro-manage things the way I do.

Beyond that, my headache kept me from even considering a look at the code to get the next part of the website rollout going.

Another thing I’m considering is an optional ( and private, if you wish ) ability to link your profile on Lit or SOL to your profile here on the website, if you’re a member. If private, it will eventually provide you with special benefits if you have me favorited as an author or have favorited a story on Lit.

I’ve already checked into everything, and I can automate this on Lit. I’ll need to look into things on SOL, and probably contact Lazeez, because he has the ability to micromanage his site in much the same way as I do, so I want him to know that if I do an automated check, it’s not something malicious and will be responsibly throttled.

If I decide to open a facebook or twitter account ( which is becoming more likely as time rolls along ) then there will probably be the same sort of benefits system going on there for likes, follows, links, etc. Ditto if you have a personal website and link to me.

Every backlink equals more people finding me, my work, and giving me the feedback that is my drug and motivation fuel to write.

Potential benefits would be early access to new stories. Most of them are submitted to Lit first, because it has a very long lag time compared to SOL. I could post local copies for readers who have validated links/favs/etc. as soon as I submit, allowing you to read before anybody else.

( Of course, I would ask that you go vote once the story posts. )

Another possibility is early access to website exclusive stories ( discussed in an earlier post ) Could be more as time rolls along and I add new features and content.

For those who have been with me for a while, you can probably guess what a large part of the rut I’m fighting my way out of right now is. It hit four years a few days ago since I lost the love of my life. This time of year is always hard as hell.

Figuring things out

Finally getting the hang of one of the elements of the software suite that runs the forum and the website that I haven’t previously delved into. It’s going to prove extremely useful for the LST3K pages. What it will allow me to do is to accept uploads of documents even if the person donating a story or auditioning to be a riffer hasn’t signed up for the website.

The former makes a lot more sense than the latter. Eventually, it will make a lot more sense for riffers to sign up, because I’m going to code utilities that let us work on the riff in concert on the website, rather than sending files back and forth via email.

It’s an important element of making those pages truly useful to me and to users. Another will be the ability to paste complete stories or riffs into a rich text form as another means of donating/auditioning.

Now that I have the basics of that down, I’m going to work on hooking up the anti-spam database to my various contact forms. Once I have those working correctly, I’ll be in position to hook up the LST3K pages as well. Initially, that will just be protecting me from spam, but as I roll out the user interactive features like uRiff, it will be keeping spammers from tossing cans of spam at people reading user submitted riffs as well.

I’m also seriously considering some website exclusive stories ( beyond my unpublished work on “My Work Extras” and the ancient porn stories on “About -> Writing Genesis” if you haven’t noticed there’s stuff not available anywhere else there )

Odds are that these will be interludes — heavy on sex, or stories with no sexual content from Danica’s World. Likely examples would be:

Telling Geflon’s backstory that fits in with Casting Off Convention, To Catch a Merchant Princess, and the forthcoming Lowborn.

Things like relating how the girls managed to ‘borrow’ Andrea’s toy and learn the command word for it several chapters back in SOTM. All of that happened off-screen, and only the aftermath is in the published story.

Stories about Andrea before she ended up at Zoraster’s complex. Because she was a virgin before meeting Danica, it limits the potential for stories I can post on Lit or SOL, but there are plenty of stories I could tell to highlight her life before the story.

I’ve just had a lot of ideas kicking around that aren’t really right for publishing in my traditional venues, but which I believe regular readers of the stories in Danica’s world would very much enjoy.

Feel free to comment here, email, or post on the forum if there’s a story you’d like to see told. Much of Blackhawk Hall and the whole of Ebon Genesis owes its origin to a reader’s suggestions. Many times, those are inspirational and really get me moving. At the same time, that inspiration gets other stories moving as well.

Bit of a lull

I’ve been in a bit of a low-motivation run the last few days. I’m getting the itch back now, but I think I needed some downtime. As I’ve mentioned before, Sanctuary of the Wood has priority because of my long-standing tradition of always putting out a new story in the series for Earth Day.

Beyond that, I’m also working on adapting the code for the anti-spam measures I’ve implemented on the forum and blog to apply to my contact forms. This is important because the LST3K section will have a couple of initial user interactive features, and eventually have many more. I want to be able to check for the spammers there and block them from coughing up spam in these sections as well.

The code to check isn’t that complicated, really. Neither is the code to automatically update the database, but I’ll probably skip that part and just save a log of any spammers caught in the other areas of the site so I can manually add them.

I’m also throttling back the plugin on the blog, because the standard spam blocking has always worked before to keep the actual posts from showing up. What the new plugin does is keep the spammers from registering and clogging up my database. However, it also blocks spam comments completely.

When I give more leeway in the new plugin, it lets more stuff through. However, the original plugin still catches all this. It also saves the spammy links when this happens, though. That allows me to submit “evidence” of the spam as well as the fact that I’ve encountered a known spammer. Eventually, that will be far more valuable information as the databases expand to start checking for spam and malware links as well as the data they already provide.

Can’t do that on the forum, because right now, the spammer attack is too concentrated there. If it ever slows down, I may throttle that back as well, for the same reason I’m throttling back on the blog. I want my website to be a source of protecting other websites from these spammer scumbags by providing every ounce of data about them I can.

Naturally, there’s a lot of story ideas and partial work floating around. There’s just not enough progress to really deserve a report here. I just want to keep the blog updated so that nobody thinks I’ve dropped off the face of the earth when I’m in a bit of a lull with forward progress.

As I’ve said before, the forum/shoutbox is another source of information. Some things get posted there at times when the blog isn’t getting updated. This may be because they’re just small things that don’t deserve much more than a quick post on the Shoutbox, or because they’re forum specific, or because that’s just where I happened to be when I thought about something *laugh*

Much better

The new direction of Sanctuary is one I’m much happier with. It doesn’t have that draggy feeling the original was giving me.

I went through the blog subscribers and eliminated around 70 that either showed up in the spam database, had names that looked plain spammy, or came from the .ru/.pl domains. Hope I didn’t get any legitimate subscribers, but I’m trying to clean up things now that the new anti-spam plugin is catching the spam subscribers before they can clutter my database 😀

I am so loving this spam database. It’s like the Roach Motel for spammers. They check in, but they don’t check out.

Not that I’m complaining about the standard plug-in that catches spam comments. It does a wonderful job as well, and hasn’t let a single spam comment come through. It just wasn’t stopping spam registrations, and this one is 🙂 It’s the double-whammy.

When you combine that with the same spam protection on the forum, my website is now wonderfully free of spammers. I smile every morning when I get up and evening when I get home from work as I review the error log of banned spammers desperately trying to log in or post spam.

I’m going to try to remember to start adding tags to my blog posts, in order to better index in search engines. That’s good for everybody, because it can lead to more feedback, which helps my motivation, which gets more stories out.

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Erotic Writing as Darkniciad and Les Lumens