Your Life Just Got Miserable Again
Over the last several weeks I’ve noticed a sudden and large increase in email and comment-spam, here in the blog and at the site. Just about one year ago there was a worldwide drop in spam when the FTC shut-down McColo (spammers haven) and it seemed for a while that the world was nearly spam-free. But, as confirmed by Google yesterday, ‘da spam is back - have you noticed?
There are a few things you can do to deal with the spamslaught.
- Bend over, grin, and take it
- use a few simple tools & techniques to fight/block it
Both at the site and here in the blog we use BadBehavior which blocks the vast majority of auto-spam bots. I also have Akismet on the blog which catches much of the ‘manual’ spam. Finally, we have a list of over 1,000,000 spammer’s servers/IP’s that are blocked at the firewall. If you’re on a shared host and/or don’t have your own firewall, you can accomplish almost the same thing by using something like the Troll module (for Drupal). We were also using Mollom at the site for a while, but between BadBehavior and our IP block-list, we decided Mollom was just getting in the way. We removed it a few weeks ago and saw no detectable increase in spam posts.
How to tell if that comment was real or spam:
I thought that everyone realized this, but after talking to a blogger-friend that had no idea that all those new comments on his blog were actually just spam-posts for a free link, I figure I should share it.
Have you gotten those comments in your blog that go like this: “nice blog, keep up the good work“, or “I never thought of it this way, you explained it very well” ? Well, I hate to break it to you, but those aren’t admirers - dem’s spammers. Here is a quick test I use to determine if the post is real, or just a spammer trying to take advantage of my DoFollow:
The spammers post these same comments on a million different blogs, so ask yourself “would this comment make as much sense on any other post?” - if the answer is YES, then it’s probably a generic spam post; If the URL provided by the person making the post also happens to go to some “payday loans” or “viagra” site, then it’s definitely spam. So basically, if the comment does not add any value to that specific post, or if it is so generic it could be applied to any post, it’s probably spam.
Of course, some bloggers/webmasters don’t care about the spam and allow it to go unchecked. But, I do all i can to protect my site members and blog readers from spam, and I’m proud to say that we’re 99.9% spam free.
What tools methods do you use to fight comment-spam, or do you just not care?
Is It Just Me Or Is FeedBurner Broke ?
My Feedburner is broken
I know I haven’t been posting much but I’ve noticed that in the last three days, my feedburner numbers have dropped by about one-third.
I pulled up my RSS/Feedburner URL and got the error shown above.
Anyone else having trouble with their Feedburner feeds, or am I the only lucky one?
The Easiest Way To Speed Up Your CMS Or Blog
One of the reasons I’ve done so many upgrades/updates recently is to improve the performance of the server/website(s). Now that I’ve got those out of the way I’ve had some time to do a bit of research to find some easy ways to speed things up. Remember that I’m UnixTarded, so anything I do must be on the easy side.
Based an my reading, one of the best ways to improve the performance of not only Drupal, but any PHP script (Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, etc) is to install a PHP accelerator/cache such as APC or eAccelerator. There are many (manyyy) other things that can be done - but adding a PHP accelerator/cache seemed to be one of those one-time, relatively easy things that can reportedly increase (CMS) website performance by 2x - 10x.
After a little more reading it seems that APC (my first choice to try) is not compatible with the Zend extensions that I’m using, so I decided to install eAccelerator. Installing eAccelrator via WHM/cPanel is easy, and I had it up and running in minutes, with zero issues.
After clearing my browser cache and reloading the site I noticed an immediate performance improvement, especially when doing things like creating new nodes (pages) or posting comments. I also noticed an improvement on my Wordpress install while loading pages and posting comments. Things that usually took 3-5 seconds were now happening in ~1 second and things that were previously taking 1 second were happening “instantly”. I don’t have any before & after benchmarks, but I do have before & after CPU and memory usage:
- “Top” CPU usage now averages below 1% - down from 3%-5%
- RAM usage now averages 25% - down from ~50%
- Total daily CPU usage (i dont know how it’s calculated) is now ~20% for GrownUpGeek.com - before installing eAccelerator it never dropped below 60%. It’s also lower for my other site hosted on my server.
If you run a PHP script/CMS on a VPS or dedicated server, adding a PHP op-code cache/accelerator is a great, easy way to noticeably increase the performance of your site.
Upgrade Completed Successfully
After recently reading several horror stories about websites and blogs being hacked simply because they were running outdated versions of their CMS or Wordpress, I decided to upgrade - EVERYTHING. The server, the blog, the website - even my “back burner” website.
Up until the last few weeks I’ve always taken the “if it aint broke, don’t fix it” attitude. Partially because I’m lazy, and partially because I’m paranoid that something will break if I try to upgrade it. But after weighing the options I decided that if something was going to break I would rather break it on my schedule and not some Turkish hacker or script-kiddie’s schedule.
I started a couple of months ago by upgrading the site to the Drupal 5.x. I then upgraded a few things on the server and added some additional security related items (sorry, no details), and I also upgraded my other site to Drupal 5. Finally, today I topp’d it all off by upgrading my Wordpress. Even though virtually all of these mini-projects were learning experiences for me they all went 99% smooth - even the scariest part, re-compiling Apache on my server. Seems that all this time I’ve been living dangerously for no real reason.
So I’ve turned-over a new leaf and will now try to keep everything current - maybe not to the newest version of everything (no Drupal 6 or 7 just yet), but at least to supported versions. I’ve even started using a nifty Drupal module called Update Status which notifies me any time a Drupal module has an update available.
If you’re like me (lazy or afraid to break things) you might want to consider doing a few upgrades - especially if there are known vulnerabilities in old versions that you’re using. Remember - would you rather break something yourself, or have someone break it for you?
What about you? Do you always upgrade to the latest and greatest, to the current “stable”/supported version - or do you just sit back and hope nothing bad happens?
