Jeremy Harper. Get yours at flagrantdisregard.com/flickr

Archive for February 14th, 2005

Death to Spammers

Monday, February 14th, 2005

Well, today, I had the dubious joy of getting my very first WordPress comment spam. Seven minutes later, I destroyed it, but I’ve been forced to activate some anti-spam measures.

Measure One: Any comment with more than two links in it will be sent to moderation. I’ll be notified of it by e-mail, and, after I approve it as non-spam, it’ll show up on the blog.

Measure Two: Also, any comment containing certain commonly-used spam words, like viagra and casino, will be moderated.

Measure Three: I’ve installed the No-Follow plug-in. Comment spam isn’t designed to get people to click on it; it’s designed to move the target page up in the Google rankings. The no-follow plug-in makes Google ignore the spammer’s links.

Hopefully, that’ll be enough. I’ve still got a few plug-ins I can try if that isn’t enough.

But if those fail, I’m going to have to resort to some well-placed hacks.

And I don’t mean the programming kind.

The Cure for Cancer is… HIV???!

Monday, February 14th, 2005

Wow! This cool. Wired News reports that UCLA scientists have modified HIV to fight cancer in mice. Yay for gene therapy!

(Via SlashDot.)