Chris’ Blog

Well, I was sending in my homework, and it was taking FOREVER for it to go through. In the process, I got distracted looking at the information on bandwidth for some of my sites that I manage. I found that one, my brother’s for his book Redonn had a surge of traffic this month. I found this odd since I didn’t think that he had been doing much work on it. I then noticed that a lot of the traffic (most) was bots. This is never a good sign… So I found myself in the forum with a forum filled with spam. Needless to say I went through and deleted all of the spam messages, and I also deleted the users(22 of them! and 12 from September)I needed to come up with a fix to make it more difficult for “bots” to access the website. I of course started with a google search and found this article.
I did make a few changes to his setup as I used two questions, and I made them different from the one he used. The one can’t be answered by a search engine if they could manage to get that into the bot, or a bot that does math… Anyway, the hope is that we won’t have any more spam on the forum, and I thought that I would point anyone who is interested back at that post - it is a bit out of date, but it worked great for me!

October 15th will be blog action day. The idea is to have all of the thousands of bloggers in the world, to blog about the same issue, all on the same day. This year’s topic is the environment, and I am going to participate by writing a post on October 15th. I am joining a great group of bloggers who will also be doing so, and that list can be found here. (edit: Participants link no longer available…)

If you have a blog, and you would like to participate, visit the website at http://blogactionday.org for more information.