Tag: Site News

Spammers Deleted

Fuckin spammers. I am being inundated with email right now, but I am not receiving spam. I am receiving the backlash of a spam shit-fest.

Spammers are using my domain name and making up email addresses off of it to use as the from address. There are thousands of bounces, out of office replies, delivery status notifications, and other failure notifications. So far I have deleted probably close to 5000 of these.

It is my own fault for having a catch-all for the domain (since been deleted). I liked the catch all for a number of reasons.

Spammers are scum.

Upgraded Upgrades

Another upgrade this morning. I upgraded the gallery install on muddylaces to the latest version (1.5.3).

Easy peasy. Untar, overwrite files. Login again. Upgrade complete. That is how I like upgrades to work.

Not much new in this version, but there is a security upgrade, which is what prompted the upgrade.

I am also playing with gallery 2.1 install somewhere. Might be moving to it soon. 2.1 still seems slow to me, and that sucks. I have also figured out how to set it up so the urls match my current install (using the url_rewrite module). That was also a huuuuuge stumbling block. Unfortunately some of the URL’s still; aren’t to my liking.

Gallery 1.5.3 pictures url: http://www.domain.com/gallery/albumname/MG_8387
versus
Gallery 2.1 url:http://www.domain.com/gallery_2_1/albumname/MG_8387.jpg.html

I want to get rid of the .jpg.html but so far haven’t figured that one out.

Hotlinking Thieves

my space thieves

I was spending some geek time looking through my stats since I hadn’t done that in a very long time. I had to update my .htaccess according to the Dreamhost Drupal Docs so I could get access to the stats directory.

After doing this, and looking at the monthly stats I noticed that there were a *lot* of myspace referrals. Checking a few of the links I could see that tons of people were hotlinking one of my pictures.

Quick google search and I found this page: Preventing image hotlinking: An improved tutorial. In the comments there was the exact example of what I was looking for. Copy paste, upload the new .htaccess. Nothing like the taste of sweet success.

I double checked by reloading one of the myspace thieving posts, and there was a missing image. Perfect. Sometime I want to create an image to send to the thieves instead of the blankness they see.

Little Features

Little web site update here. A new bug fix Drupal release was made a while ago, and I finally got around to testing the upgrade, and performing it. muddylaces is now up to v 4.6.5

I really wish there was a version number printed somewhere in the admin interface, so I could easily see what version I am running. I guess that gets a little complicated when talking about CVS versions, and beta code. Still, it would be a nice to have feature.

I have also recently upgraded the gallery software. Not sure if I really like some of the new features, but I’d imagine I will get used to them.

Captcha Commenting

mmm, cover up what's happening

Just activated a new module here on muddylaces. The Captcha module.

Question: What is a captcha?
Answer: A method of distinguishing between people and computers (bots – something spammers use).

This will allow me to turn on anonymous commenting again, but hopefully regulate how many spam comments get posted. I’ve noticed that some of them are a little hard to read (one was impossible), so the module just generates a new one. Pretty nifty.

Oh, one note. You can’t leave a comment in someone else’s name, if they have registered at this site. This also means that if you have registered, but are not logged in, you can’t leave a comment in your own name (just login would ya?).

We’ll see how this works.