Tag: Web Development

Spam Karma

Since I was getting fed up with all of the spam comments coming into my blog, I decided that I needed something more than a shell script to fight thest comment spammers.

As many of you with WordPress can attest to, there has been this large wave of comment spamming going on. Some soulutions are to home brew a script to shut off comments on posts that are over a specific date. Mine was to write a simple PHP script that would do the most basic of basic SQL queries to delete all of the moderated queries. Hell, I even had some fun with it and made a simple little graph to display how many I got each day. But, I got tired of having those comments in my database. So, an alternative was needed.

This is when I found out about Spam Karma. I just installed it yesterday and it has been working very well. I get an email digest of all the comments that it deletes and I haven’t had one spam comment get through. It doesn’t let them enter the database, it checks the comment before it is even posted. I’d try to explain it more, but I’m not an expert on what it does quite yet. But, if you’re looking for a simple solution to this problem, I’d say go and check this out. It is a simple WP plugin and the directions are easy to follow, so try it out if you need help with your comment spamming problems.

Edit: Yeah, ok… false positives galore. Looking for new alternative.
Edit #2: So, I’m trying it out again… let’s see if it works any better.
Edit #3: I gave up and thankfully Jamie had my old wordlist.

MediaWiki Woes

I’ve had a wiki up for a few months on my site and I thought that it would/could be a great tool for the upcoming capstone. So, we made some pages and had some suff on there (proposal, ideas, features, etc…). It was working out really well. I liked it.

I think that a wiki is a powerful tool. But, so is RSS. So, David asks me if there is an RSS feed for it and I tell him no. I then begin to look for wikis that have RSS. I want to stay w/ MediaWiki since that is what I’ve used in the past. So, I head over to their site and I realize that there is a new version. Not just a little release, but a freakin’ point relase. Seeing that I should upgrade, I do what everybody should do when they updgrade. I backup. I got my SQL dump and my entire wiki directory. I’m set, right?

At this point I begin the installation process. Things are going fine and the installation goes all and well. But, I go to look at my wiki when it is over and I see this blasted message:

[pear_error: message="failed to open stream: Operation not permitted" code=0 mode=return level=notice prefix="" info=""]

Yeah, ok, an error. No biggie. I look it up online and I find this helpful tidbit. So, my lines in my PHPTAL.php file now look like:

if (strtoupper(substr(PHP_OS, 0, 3)) == "WIN") {
$default_temp = "/path/to/your/temp/tmp";
} else {
$default_temp = "/path/to/your/temp/tmp";
}

I know that I did it for both the Windows and Unix systems. I did this because I was having problems with it working, so I just put it in both places. Then, I make my new temp directory in my home directory and CHMOD 777 (yes, that is bad, I know). I reload it and bam! Same message!

At this point I am just frustrated. So, I delete the entire wiki directory and begin the upload my backup to my site. I process my SQL file and I’m back to normal. Right? Wrong! Same damn error message. Ok, now what?

My current state of logic is that I should just upgrade. There are security updates and some feature additions (no clue on it now has RSS) which might be good to have. So, I install the same thing over that I just did an hour or two ago. Well, you can guess where this is headed… Broken! That’s where!

I do this for a couple hours and now I am here… with a busted wiki.

EDIT: OMG WTF. It works… How the hell did that happen?!
EDIT #2: The reason why it wasn’t working after I changed the PHPTAL.php file was becasue the FTP client I was using was not changing the CHMOD on the directory to 777 until after I refreshed my FTP screen. So, if you can get the permissions set right, you’re all set. I just had a bad FTP experience.