Another Opinion Among Many

I tried something interesting to see what would result.  For one day, I turned off the Simple Spam Filter plugin, written by the most excellent Tan Tan Noodles coder, Joe Tan.  I wanted to see how much SPAM it was actually prefiltering.  Now, my site gets pretty low traffic, as far as sites go.  Depending on the stats program I use, either 160ish or 700ish visitors came to see me per day on the highest traffic months.  My total bandwidth usage has grown to about 3.5GB per month (thanks in part to the low number of videos and pictures that I host).

After entering some new keywords into the “banned words” list, I stopped having to moderate any comments at all through the Akismet moderation panel.  Anybody who has commented has probably been stopped by SSF and asked if they are indeed human at least once, as there are some pretty common words that show up in spammers comments as well as normal ones done by humans that care to engage in a REAL conversation.  I hope that you’ve enjoyed my attempt at humourously presenting the verification button to you.

What I was worried about was that legitimate commenters weren’t getting their point accross, as no spam to moderate is a bit strange.  Hopefully all you real, live commenters realize by now that you just have to click the button to have your comment appear without any further moderation.

So, what was the result? Of the comments that came through that Akismet hasn’t learned yet and auto-deleted, I got 48 comments in my spam moderation queue.  There were no false positives.  I turned SSF back on and the spam comments stopped getting through.  Thank you, TanTan Noodles!

Some time over night, my visitor counter, which simply counts unique IP addresses that visit my site, topped the 40,000 mark.  That means that I have counted at least 40,000 visitors since I started using the counter (its a small php script that dumps its data into a text file).  That’s a lot.  Thanks for coming over.  I hope that you felt at home.

I recently wrote about what runs this silly place. One of the things I mentioned (okay listed in FULL) was the list of plugins that I currently use on my Wordpress blog.

Changes:

removed

• Extended Live Archives (I wanted a different look)
• Related Posts (WP 2.3 broke it, like the get_links function)

added

• Aizatto’s Related Posts - Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. Inspired by Related Posts By Ezwan Aizat Bin Abdullah Faiz.
• Clean Archives Reloaded - A nice, uniform, single-query, moo.fx-enhanced way to display your post archives. By Viper007Bond.
• No Self Pings - Keeps WordPress from sending pings to your own site. By Michael D. Adams.
• Plugin Output Cache - Provides a caching mechanism for the output from plugins. The cache is cleared whenever the blog content changes. By Rob Marsh, SJ.
• WordPress.com Stats - Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key. By Andy Skelton.

So far so good. If you’ve noticed a few images on older posts not showing, its partly my fault for not properly uploading them to my host. There seems to be an issue with directory permissions that I’ve still got to sort out with the built in image uploader as well, but I’ll figure that out. I’m sure that’s also my fault.

My car’s been out of commission for the last week, as the heater core decided to go on it and the car started spitting green stuff like an alien on an old Flash Gordan movie (wait, that looked more black than green, as it was black and white). For those who are of the Platinum card-touting, SUV-I-dont-care-aboutfuel-economy crowd, you won’t even come close to understanding this. But, you can try if you want. This is a $400 repair job, pretty much (Including the tow I insisted on - wanted to still have an engine to work on, after all). That $400 is about $400 too much for me to be able to afford, so the car remains parked until payday.

But anyhow, I’ve been using the transit bus to get around town when I needed to. However, the bus pretty much sticks to an hourly schedule, without running at all mid-morning, mid-afternoon, or any time between 6:30 and 10:30pm (or so it seems). They don’t go more frequently, it is said, because the ridership won’t support the added runs. I don’t know what those that plan these things are using for data, because they’ve never tried it. I’m sure that there hasn’t been any real poll to the effect either, as I would have been advised by someone, for sure, if not participating.

So, after that bit of a rant, I wonder if anyone else feels that there would be sufficient interest in using the transit bus if the runs were expanded a bit more and the bus came by more often. If you think so, leave a comment. Who knows where this will go. If you’ve never commented before, I don’t mind if you start. Just remember that I approve all first time comments from an email address to protect against spammers but once I get to your comment (usually within hours), you’ve got free reign to comment as you please from then on!

If you’re from the Fredericton area and would like your “vote” recorded on a possible petition to change the transit system, start your comment with a capital letter “F” (or email me to let me know). I doubt that this will get that far, but I don’t know. My website stats say that I am, by far, not the only one who hangs out here from time to time.

So, if I could get to and from work on time (which I can’t) by bus, I’d probably leave my car parked except for out of town trips and grocery runs. But, that’s not practical in today’s situation. Maybe we can change that this time around.

This type of content is why spammers get caught in even the simplest of traps.

You see, I know that I do good work.  Thanks for the encouragement, though.  Your comment didn’t show much work, though.

I also know that its a nice site.  I do have taste, you know.  I try to produce content, you know.  I’ve worked hard on making it look the way that I want, you  know.  My site stats show that others also think so.  Of course its a nice site.  Thanks for pointing out the obvious.

Its a shame that you won’t be around to write better comments.  You see, I hate your ilk and I take the time to make sure that you stop violating your host’s and ISP’s TOS.  You betcha.  You’re being reported to your web host and also to your ISP.  Have fun without hosting or internet.  Bye now.

Rose cannot accept the knowledge that her daughter Sharon is dying of a fatal disease. Over the protests of her husband, she flees with her child, intending to take the girl to a faith healer. On the way, she ends up driving through a portal in reality, which takes her to the eerie and deserted town of Silent Hill. Sharon disappears in Silent Hill, and Rose follows what she thinks is her daughter’s silhouette all over town. It’s soon clear the town is not like any place she’s ever been. It’s inhabited by a variety of creatures and a living darkness that descends and literally transforms everything it touches. The human inhabitants - the ones who are left - are trapped and fighting a losing battle against the Darkness. Joined by a cop named Cybil, who has been sent to bring her and Sharon back, Rose searches for her little girl while learning the history of Silent Hill and that Sharon is just a pawn in a larger game. To save her daughter, Rose makes a deal with a demon in the form of a little girl…..

I watched this movie tonight. It was interesting, considering that I’ve not played the video game that it was adapted from. I can’t say that this is the best made movie that I’ve seen, as the beginning left a bit too much for the imagination, in my opinion. It caused a jerkiness of storyline, leaving me wondering how the movie got to the point it was at. i think that I needed a tiny bit more background. As you can read in the synopsis above, I didn’t get that the daughter was dying. I did get that she was going to get her daughter some help, but the turnoff to Silent Hill was totally unexpected and it felt thrust upon the viewer. From that point on, the movie became watchable and was a bit of a suspenseful gore-fest after all.

If you have a bit of patience, and especially if you’ve played the game, you should enjoy this movie. I don’t get how its #1 in the box office, but then again, I watched it didn’t I.

Site stats say that the asshole blog spammers are hard at work (look to the right for current 7 day stat) but no emails from anyone saying their creative genius has been deleted without a chance at moderation, so I’m to conclude that the last 60 attempts at commenting were really spammers.  Gosh! I’m flattered! Now, spammer assholes! Why not actually visit my site and comment properly.  And, while your’e at it, why not click on some ads by my sponsors! Yeah! You can make me some money and you can go into the poorhouse.  Suck ass blog spammers! I’ve not even had to moderate your efforts.  I hope that feels like shit. Have a good sleep, spammer assholes! I know that I will.