Having one of those brain-freeze sort of days for no good reason. I've gotten plenty of work done, but I just feel like I'm not as on-the-ball as usual. I hate those sort of days. At least the release is shaping up nicely!
I go down to see Lis in 8 days! I'm excited. :-) We're also starting to plan her trip up here in August. That should be a blast as well.
My cousin Maggie came over last night because she needed help with her calculus. Boy, it sure has been a while since I had to do that stuff! I remembered a bit of it, but not enough to be that helpful. I could explain limits to her off the top of my head, but I need to go back and re-read my book to refresh myself on derivatives. Eek!
Dad's coming over again tonight to help with some plumbing. We have most of it taken care; only about two more sticks to solder and then my sprinkler system should be functional again. I'm quite excited to use free water. :-)
Sorry (Scott) that I haven't posted any new pictures of Pixel yet. It's not that she isn't constantly doing photo-worthy things. It's that every time she does them, she stops before I can get a picture. She does this sort of thing to taunt me.
I'm quite happy with how well the forums are going. Almost 2500 users with almost 30,000 posts in under a year of operation is nothing to sneeze at. I've been hearing that the mailing lists have gone way down in traffic recently too -- anyone else noticed this? My biggest gripe with the forums is the increasing amounts of spam. We're getting about one spam/spam account a day. Mike and I do a pretty good job of keeping on top of it (especially with the help of users who point the spam out to us), but it's still annoying that it's an issue at all.
Speaking of spam, the spam load has increased on my blog recently as well. I have to remove (on an average day) about 1000 spam messages. And that's with a rather large blacklist of words which simply delete the comments before they hit the moderation queue. Quite annoying, but the moderation queue does wonders for keeping it out of the public view. So if you ever find yourself getting annoyed that your comments go into moderation: I have a valid reason for doing it this way. Sorry for the annoyance, but I figure it's better than having to wade thru thousands of spam comments instead.
Well, since my brain is fairly well mush right now, I think I'm gonna wrap things up. Happy coding (for those of you who code)!
You think you're not on the ball? I just went through a 100-hour course (10 hours of class a day) while enduring a kidney stone. The damn thing has refused to leave the warm cuddly safety of my kidney for over two weeks. While pain pills keep me sane, I'm definitely not alert.
Aaron- I just noticed your comment about Pixel. We've got the same problem. We use a digital camera, and its lag time after hitting the shutter button is too long to catch whatever cuteness our cats are displaying. Instead of getting a picture of Louie or Ricky pouncing on a toy, we'll get a blurry, streaked picture of a cat butt as it speeds by. ;-)
@Scott -- Ouch! I hope you get better soon! And I know what you mean about the cats; pix does that to me all time. But she'll usually do something cute, wait for me to get the camera, and when I get back into the room, she's done.
"mailing lists have gone way down in traffic recently" Yeah, I've noticed that. And although there are still some really knowledgeable people there, lots of people are conspicuous by their absence.
I was having the same problemon my blog, with comment spam, I then added a Chcka (??? Spelling?) and have gone down to zero comment spam. I gahter spam bots don't like to type in randome letters and numbers.
There has to be a plugin for WordPress.
Ok, here are some:
http://franzetic.com/2006/04/21/authcss-version-15/
http://coffelius.arabandalucia.com/index.php?p=9
I like this one best: http://www.blueeye.us/wordpress/index.php?p=5
Get to it, 1000 spams a day is a lot of productive time, don't say I never gave you anything!
I really think the Betas list should be moved to an invite-only forum as well. I'm not sure of the real advantages of keeping it as a mailing list, but I can think of plenty of reasons why it should be a forum.
For the forum account spam check this MOD that I just installed on a phpBB forum:
http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=399374
@Travis: But then how would we know as soon as a new beta is announced?
@Travis: Don't forget that some of the core members of the Beta list (one in particular springs to mind) hate forums and love mailing-lists
@steve: Tough noogies on them.
@Bill: this would be some colonial expression with which I am not familiar, presumably.
Am I to take it that you are agreeing with me ?
;)
@Phil: you could have an announcements topic (site admins/non-spammers only to post) where all new releases were guaranteed to be announced.
Those who wish could watch the topic so they are notified by mail.
A good approach I've used so far is to moderate new members for a short while, and to un-mod them if they behave, ban them if they spam. What constitutes "a short while" depends on how much you can handle... it may just be their first post, or it may be for a week, month, first N posts...
I run a reasonably large phpBB forum for my software as well. 99% of the spam accounts are just there to improve page rank. You should just either disable the member list (who seriously needs to scroll through a list of 2500 members?) or make it so that google doesn't index that page using your robots.txt file. There is no point in wasting time deleting them, as they will never become active. I probably have 500 fake accounts registered on my forum.
As for the spam topics themselves, the solution is simply to get more moderators. My forum has about four moderators and four administrators and our spam/day is gone within minutes of the posting.
I've tried installing several anti-spam mods, but I've determined that most of the spam bots are actually manned by people who type in the captcha and register somewhat manually. I noticed very little difference even with the latest and greatest mods.
As for wordpress spam, my blog (http://blog.wolfire.com/) has no issues. I don't moderate comments and I am using the built in spam catcher (http://akismet.com/) which seems quite good. I only seem to get about 50 spams/day though, which is not even close to your thousand.