Povert

Testing the wordpress iPhone app.

Twitter has ruined my ability to write more than a handful of words at a time.

I’m in the process of changing web hosts. Over the next few days, some of my stuff may appear to be broken or gone. I’ll get it up and going again. That includes this blog, Flapping Crane, Wrestle that Shark, etc.

I’ve finally upgraded my installation of WordPress. Hopefully there won’t be any problems.

One thing I find very annoying is the apparent lack of configuration options for the archive list. I don’t want to list it by month, since there are posts going back to May 2004.

I’ve looked at various plugins, but I don’t like anything I’ve seen so far. So I may just have to do it myself.

I’m thinking I might have one pulldown menu for each year, from which one could select the month.

Spam has been on my mind lately. Namely, email spam, comment spam, and wiki spam.

I’ve bitched about this before.

I’ve been experimenting on reducing blog comment spam. I recently upgraded WtS to the newest version of WordPress, which comes with the very interesting Akismet plugin. So far, it seems to be working. And of course here on Povert I use the “Are you a fucking robot” reading test. If the WTS experiment works, then I’ll go ahead and upgrade the blog here (though that will be a bit of work — I’ve actually made some custom changes to my installation of WordPress).

But. I got a message from my sister the other day, asking how to protect her wiki. She runs it for her husband’s family. Kind of a geneology/scrapbook kind of thing. She’s put a lot of work into it.

But guess what?

Some assholes out there think it’s ok to use bots to not only spam wikis, but to overwrite their pages.

So poor Lisa got a message the other day from a family member asking why there were casino ads on the wiki instead of the regular content.

Now there are of course certain things she can do to prevent this. Still, these people are pricks.

I really am very pissed off about all this. It makes me mad that I have to install special software, plugins, etc. just to avoid being driven nuts by a barrage of spam. Maybe it’s because I actually remember a time when the most annoying things in my inbox were chain letters.

I’m also sick of having to protect my email addresses, because it always eventually fails. I’ve had two accounts that I’ve been pretty careful with. My .mac account and my gmail account. I don’t give them out to anyone or anything that I don’t have reason to correspond personally with. I’ve recently started getting spam at both. And I know exactly why. In a nutshell, folks — don’t click those “email this to a friend” links. Don’t do it. Email me the link if you want, or even copy and paste it. But don’t use their website to email me their stuff. If you’re gonna do that crap, while you’re at it, why not just give them my home address and phone number?

A lot of people aren’t careful with other people’s email addresses. This sucks.

However — this has inspired me to do a little experiment. I’m going to find out exactly which companies distribute email addresses, whether their so-called “privacy-policies” indicate it or not. Here’s what I’m going to do — I’ll create a few random email addresses. Completely random, and kind of long. So that no one would ever just guess them. Then I’ll carefully mete those email addresses out to one and only one place each.

Who else wants to play? I know one or two of you out there have domains that you can try this with.