Toluu : Holy Shmoly!

Holy Shmoly!

The life and times of me

Anti spam-blog plugin for WordPress MUJuly 10

The very popular WP Hashcash plugin for WordPress has been modified to work on the WordPress MU signup page.

WP Hashcash is an anti spam plugin that protects blogs from comment spam. It does this with Javascript and is quite successful. I worked on it over the last few days and the plugin now offers the same protection on the WordPress MU signup form!

This is the first release of the code so handle with care. Grab the latest version (version 4.2 as of this moment) from the download page. Unzip it and copy wp-hashcash.php into wp-content/mu-plugins/ and visit “Site Admin” -> “WordPress Hashcash” to confirm it’s working.

Now logout and create a new blog, just to make sure everything is working ok. Occasionally some users will have problems registering, and those that have Javascript turned off won’t be able to create a new blog at all. That’s the downside of using this plugin unfortunately.

Keep an eye on the stats counter on the admin page. I want to hear how well this works on your site!

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Yet another anti-spam measure

WordPress MU 2.6 beta 1July 9

WordPress MU 2.6 beta 1 is now available. WordPress 2.6 is due for release shortly and it’s already on it’s third beta so it’s times for WordPress MU to be updated.

This release has many new features as well as a few security fixes. In his beta 1, beta 2 and beta 3 posts Ryan listed some of the main features, including post revisioning, gears support for faster loading, theme previews, better SSL support and much much more.

WordPress MU specific changes include:

The version number is being bumped to 2.6 rather than 1.6 because of version confusion. Minor MU versions will probably append a letter to the version.
Signup page now has a nonce to help defeat spammers.
Plugins in wp-content/plugins/ are version checked like in WordPress. mu-plugins isn’t covered just yet.
Major object cache changes.
And many more bug fixes. Check the timeline for a list of changes.

Download wordpress-mu-2.6-beta1.zip

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Excuses for ringing in sickJuly 9

If you thought you’d heard it all, watch this video and listen to the outrageous lies and excuses four guys give their new employers. How long can they last and who will remain employed the longest before being fired?

Film by Dogmedia Productions (warning, large embedded movie file), via Jazzbiscuit and Justin. Originally shown at the Darklight Festival in 2007.

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Back to the EightiesJuly 4

Well, the Irish economy is tanking and is heading towards recession. Last time things were this bad was in the Eighties so here’s a few memories from that decade. After yesterday’s rather technical post, I need a nice squeaky throw away nostalgic one today.

The Fall Guy

Greatest American Hero

And for my Irish visitors..

Dempsey’s Den with Ian Dempsey and Zig and Zag

Wanderly Wagon

More ways to stop spammers and unwanted trafficJuly 3

Comment spammers, trackback spam, stupid bots and AVG linkscanner eating into your bandwidth and server resources? Here’s how to put a dent in their activities with a few mod_rewrite rules.

I hate those blogs that send me fake trackbacks and pingbacks. Unfortunately it’s impossible to stop but this morning I figured out a way of stopping some of them.

Look through the log files of your web server for the string ‘ “-” “-”‘. Lots of requests there aren’t there? I found 914 requests yesterday. Those are requests without a USER_AGENT or HTTP_REFERER and almost all of them are suspicious because they weren’t followed by requests for images, stylesheets. or Javascript files. Unfortunately the WordPress cron server also falls into this category so you need to filter out requests from your own server’s IP address.

This morning I checked up on a spam trackback that came in. This one came from 85.177.33.196:

URL: /xmlrpc.php
HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA: <?xml version=”1.0″?>
<methodCall>
<methodName>pingback.ping</methodName>
<params>
<param>
<value><string>http://7wins. eu/cbprod/detail_10347/cure+your+tight+foreskin.html</string></value>
</param>
<param>
<value><string>http://ocaoimh.ie/2005/03/01/i-am-bored-sites-for-when-youre-bored/all-comments/</string></value>