WordPress boasts that it “powers” “10%” of the web, but far more awesome is that it attracts 98% of the flies. I went into this business hoping to share a few impressions, tracks and photos from my journey and all I get stuck with is the blowies. Time to reflect on blogging and what it’s worth.
Scarcely does a WordPress site go online, but it’s besieged by sploggers. People sending a username and an email address to subscribe, but sending it via another server. People sending comments on your blog entries, but sending them via another server. Why not use the forms on my server to do this? Well, because security is a four-letter word for WordPress, and the default installation allows anyone to send forms from their server to yours and yours will process the request. So if you wanted people to register before posting comments, there was no way to force them to do this; if you wanted subscribers to pass a captcha test there was also no way of forcing this.
A straightforward blockage of third-party servers was implemented (meaning subscription and comment forms that came only from skeptic.de were processed) and this nonsense stopped for a while.
I suppose that that first wave was bot-mediated; what followed was I suspect more human in nature.
Hotmail user with random eight-letter address
Plenty of nonsense registrations with this pattern (included a random 10-letter string as a user name) and could be blocked as well. Until whoever it was started using 9-letter addresses.
User:pletcher***, email: mayncmams@328merry.com
This guy is a real nutter. Nary a day goes by without a registration from him. The last three letters of the username vary and the email host is sometimes 328hairy.com or 347leery.com. Nevertheless this guy works hard.
I often wonder what it’s like when he gets home of an evening and his Significant Other asks, “Hi, hon, what was work like today?” and he says, “Lot to do. Set up ten accounts at ten different blogs and guess what? Nobody can ever use them!” Sorry one of us is missing something here, something that normally fits between two ears. You fill out a registration with a fantasy email account, and then you can’t even access the password you need to log in to the site. Huh?
In the end I stopped all registrations. It was just unbearable to continue contemplating the life that pletcher*** must be living.
CHEAP FAKE HANDBAGS
They were first good for unsolicited comments, then they started try to splog their way into the trackbacks. Perhaps someone should tell them they could save their time, because if the site they are wanting to link to has no link to skeptic.de, then their splog is automatically junked. End of story.
Look, sploggers, there is no free beer here, no free anything, except for some information and pictures. If you can’t work out how to use them, bad luck. Just quit splogging around on my turf. Go get yourselves a life.
