Posts Tagged: spam

Noticed / Thoughts — 2 Comments
4
Sep 07

Rheingold on Facebook

Howard Rheingold, a guy who knows a bit about virtual communities, has turned bearish on Facebook. And you know what, I can’t blame him. Rheingold says:

I am getting half a dozen Facebook friend requests a day from people who claim not to remember friending me. When I complained in my status message, another Facebooker told me that the “Friend Finder” overrides user privacy settings and spams friend requests via users’ gmail contact lists. Between that and the really awful message board feature that renders groups near meaningless, I’m beginning to conclude that Facebook growth will start slowing, then stagnate, and eventually it will die a slow death. It’s too much work to respond to friend requests, too little ability to set my own boundaries, too many silly apps, and not enough return on the investment of my time. They seriously should have taken the big money when it was offered. If Facebook founders think they are going to be the “social operating system of the web,” they are delusional. They won’t even be AOL. It’s definitely an interesting fad at that moment, and if I ignore all demands on my attention, it can be a useful broadcast channel. But as an online social network, it’s sinking itself.

Howard’s point about “return on investment” is essential. Facebook distanced itself from competition because it delivered relevant social information in a sleek, efficient manner. As networks expand and my messages and newsfeeds get spammed, I get a lot less signal per noise. Facebook should refocus on delivering relevant social information without spam. There is a very clear inverse relationship between spamminess and information utility – FB should be mindful of that.

Thoughts — 8 Comments
10
Jun 07

Too Much of a Good Thing

Has FB made it too easy to spam your friends?

Hacks — 9 Comments
17
Feb 07

Stopping Advo junk mail (hopefully)

If there’s one type of junk mail that really annoys me, it is Advo flyers. Advo is the company that spams your RL mailbox with loose newspaper flyers, under the name “ShopWise”. Basically, they pay the postman to drop these flyers in your mailbox (accompanied by a mailer postcard featuring two pictures of missing persons – what charity).

I was tired of the clutter, unnecessary trash and occasional litter (caused by blowing flyers) Advo creates, so I went looking for a way to stop delivery of this spam. And sure enough, there’s a way to opt-out. Advo provides a web form that supposedly lets you take yourself off their mailing list. I’ve got no idea if it works or not, but I’m passing it along as a resource in case you’re as annoyed by Advo’s spam as I am.

Hacks / Software — 3 Comments
3
Feb 05

Removing MT Comments Spam

A simple shell script for removing Movable Type comment spam from archived MT html pages. To be run in your mt/archive folder

#!/bin/bash
find . -type f -group nobody | sed ’s/^\..//g’ > mtcomment.txt

for i in `cat mtcomment.txt`;
do zfile=$i;
xfile=${zfile%.html}.htmlbak;
sed ‘/<* di* * vclass=\”comments-body\”/,/<\/di* *v>/d’ $i > $xfile;
mv -f $xfile $i;
done

rm mtcomment.txt

Note, you’ll need to remove the two asterisks (**) from the sed line in the do. Blogger won’t let me publish that.

Hacks / Software — No Comments
18
Dec 04

Blogs and Comment Spam

The hot story going through the blogosphere right now is the fact that spammers have hijacked commenting utilities to create denial-of-service attacks on ISP’s. Let’s just say that yeah, its a problem. I’ve spent a good part of my weekend dealing with b2, the old Wordpress. You see, the migration procedure for b2 is less-than-native, because any sort of in-depth documentation is less-than-existent. I got so fed up today that I actually wrote my own, so I guess this is my first experience with online collaborative wiki document writing. I want it to get spidered sooner, so here’s my doc. Hope it helps others!

I found this upgrade to be challenging, largely because the documentation over-simplifies a b2->wordpress upgrade. I’ll attempt to explain in relatively simple terms. If you end up using some of the more advanced parts of this documentation, it is assumed that you are generally familiar with mysql. A graphical interface, like phpmyadmin, might be a more native interface for some users..

First, let’s assume you have a working installation of b2. B2 uses 5 tables:

categories

comments

posts

settings

users

Further assuming that you’ve completed a stock installation, b2 prepended a “b2″ to the names of these tables. In your database, you’ll see:

b2categories

b2comments

b2posts

b2settings

b2users

The general theory of operations for the b2->wp upgrade is this:

1. Wordpress must first be installed and connected to the database.

2. After running the install, wordpress creates a number of tables in this database. If you’ve completed a generic installation of Wordpress, a wp_ will be prepended to the newly created table names.

3. The user must then drop a few tables, and rename the existing b2 tables so they now comply with the Wordpress standard.

4. The user must then run the installation script.

Let’s assume for a second that a user has completed two stock installations. The first is a stock b2 installation, and now they have installed wordpress, stock. After running wp-admin/install.php, their database would have the following tables:

b2categories

b2comments

b2posts

b2settings

b2users

wp_categories

wp_comments

wp_linkcategories

wp_links

wp_optiongroup_options

wp_optiongroups

wp_options

wp_optiontypes

wp_optionvalues

wp_post2cat

wp_posts

wp_users

The prefixes generate confusion. For a mental exercise, strip away the prepended “b2″ and “wp_” from each table in our database. You’d notice that 5 of them are duplicates. For each of these 5 duplicates, one table is your old b2 table, which contains data, and one is a new wp table, that you havent populated yet.

The somewhat tricky part is knowing that you actually need to drop the wp duplicates, and rename the b2 tables so that they conform to your newly installed table prefix structure. Complex? It is almost better explained in code.

What you need to do is the following:

First, you must drop the WP duplicates (this is a SQL query):

DROP TABLE wp_categories;

DROP TABLE wp_comments;

DROP TABLE wp_posts;

DROP TABLE wp_settings;

DROP TABLE wp_users;

Next, you must rename the b2 tables so that they conform to the current table structure (this is also a SQL query):

RENAME TABLE b2categories TO wp_categories;

RENAME TABLE b2comments TO wp_comments;

RENAME TABLE b2posts TO wp_posts;

RENAME TABLE b2settings TO wp_settings;

RENAME TABLE b2users TO wp_users;

Once you complete this, you will need to run the import-b2.php script. Magically, the upgrade will work.

The most important thing about making the upgrade from b2 to wordpress work is knowing that the prefix is important. If you try and install a wordpress with the same prefix as your b2, it won’t work. If you install it with a different prefix, the import-b2.php script won’t work out of the box. This is a fairly low-level fix, but it will work. If you aren’t comfortable running it, show this page to a reasonably technical person, and they should be able to read this and know what to do.