The Real Ryan J. Parker

Since upgrading to WordPress 2.3.2, the webserver that hosts my blog has taken a beating from trackback spammers.

The trackback requests were prevalent before, but for some reason they weren’t slowing the server down until the upgrade.

After trying many solutions, I finally found a way to solve the problem. This will no longer allow you to have trackbacks on your blog, but if you have to decide between no blog or no trackbacks then I’m sure you’ll have no problem implementing this.

Basically you just update your index.php to the following:

if ( preg_match('/trackback/', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) ) {
die();
} else {
/* Short and sweet */
define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);
require('./wp-blog-header.php');
}
?>

You might need to modify the preg_match() so that you don’t cut off legit posts that have trackback in the name, but the blog I use this code on does not have such posts.

Hopefully some day soon these spammers will realize they’re doing no one any good.

I’ve found a weird inconsistency with my Google homepage, and it appears to be created by RSS feeds that have FeedBurner’s URL tracking features turned on.

The problem I’m having is that of web usability.

From time to time, the links that appear as visited on my Google homepage (because I’ve visited them, of course) turn back to the non-visited color sometime later. This sucks, because I know I’ve visited the pages before, but I have to make sure I have read it first.

This creates major problems for someone like me with OCD (no, I don’t perform rituals).

The only common theme with all of the feeds that show this type behavior is that they all have FeedBurner’s URL tracking turned on.

I don’t use Google Reader or any other RSS reader, so I’m wondering if it’s just Google homepage, or if all RSS readers have this problem.

Has anyone else noticed this behavior on their Google homepage or other RSS reader? If you use FeedBurner URL tracking would you please turn it off?

Tags: feedburner, url, tracking, google, homepage, link, color, ocd

Over the past two days my sports handicapping blog has received an incredible amount of blog spam.

I’m not sure what the Akismet count was before this massive amount of blog comment spam started, but as of now it’s at 29,793. I suspect this is at least 20,000 more than what it was at a few days ago.

I’ve only noticed this activity on that specific blog, but I can’t help but wonder if anyone else is being targeted by these large networks of blog spammers. I have a script that shows the last 100 access requests to the website, and a majority of the requests are to my wp-comments-post.php file from a wide array of hosts.

I first noticed the activity when I received a lot of comments being held in moderation. They were links to various ring tone and other spammy services from EDU addresses, but even after marking a lot of them as SPAM they continued to make it through Akismet. As such, I simply filtered it into my blacklist and had them all sent to the SPAM bucket.

I have no idea what the posting rules these spammers have setup, but the requests don’t look they’re going to stop anytime soon, so I updated my template to rename the wp-comments-post.php file to i-hate-spam.php.

Anyone else seeing this type of activity from spamming networks posting EDU addresses for ring tones and other such goods?

Tags: wordpress, blog, comment, spam

If you require that your reader’s login to comment on your blog then you might be missing out on valuable discussion.

As a reader, it’s a real pain when I want to leave a comment, but instead I’m presented with a You must be logged in to comment message.

I never quite realized how much of a pain this is when I started my sports handicapping blog in December of 2005, but I required that readers login to comment because of all the spam comments I was receiving (and deleting).

Since that time, however, I’ve come to know and love the power of Akismet for catching comment spam, and when you combine Akismet with the WordPress option to moderate any comments with links in them, you’re not likely to see any spam comments make it through with you seeing them first.

So if you require your readers login to comment, why exactly are you doing it? Are you hoping for little to no discussion?

Thankfully I don’t run into this too much, but while trying to comment on the AuctionAds blog about their new window targeting option I had to go through the mind numbing process of registering for an account just so I could leave a comment.

Don’t do that to your readers. Who knows how much valuable conversation you’re missing.

Tags: wordpress, require login to comment

Ask and you shall receive: I’ve updated my Show Unread Comments WordPress plugin to incorporate a few suggestions from people just like you.

The first change made to the plugin is actually a bug fix. With the initial version, the statuses of comments on pages were not marked appropriately, and status indicators were not showing up next to comments on pages. This has been fixed, so you’ll now see comments being tracked properly on pages.

The next change made to the plugin is the most popular feature request: the ability to return a binary value with show_unread_comment_status().

Now all you have to do is pass bin for $type and you’ll be returned true if the comment has been read and false if the comment is unread. This should make dynamically updating CSS for read and unread comments a snap.

Make sure you visit the Show Unread Comments page to get all the intimate details.

If you’re in a hurry you can download the latest version of the plugin at:

I’ve still got one more feature I’d like to get implemented, and that’s for the ability to create a direct link to the oldest unread comment when you’re viewing a given post or page, so if you’ve got any other feature requests or find a bug make sure you comment below or contact me so I can make sure to include it in the next version!

Tags: show unread comments, 1.1, update, wordpress, plugin