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Well, believe it or not, comment spam is a huge problem for this blog. At one point, I installed a small catchpa script (you know, those annoying boxes where you have to re-type an obfuscated mix of numbers and letters.) It worked – up until last month.

You see, spammers hire individuals to fill out these forms for them. It’s an automated process, and those that fill out the forms get fractions of a cent per completed form. It’s not a lot of money, but it’s viable in third world regions where there is access to cyber cafes.

These are the terms that are on my blacklist. If you type any of these words, your post will automatically be deleted. No moderation, just straight-out deleted. If anyone else has a new way of defeating these spammers, I’m all ears.

Blacklisted words:
emistry.com
forex
phentermine
casino
xanax
syntrax
71.104.7.176
59.92.39.221
72.197.80.212
206.222.30.2
69.93.240.143
207.226.172.18
66.98.134.34
analsex
195.225.176.84
69.61.29.218
38.96.1.97
68.87.64.106
http://www.axo.ho.com.ua
tramadol
phpbbx.de
freepowerboards
blogspot.com
.info

Feb. 2, 2007 — There are new developments in the case of Genarlow Wilson, a 17-year-old Georgia high school football star and honor student who received a mandatory 10-year prison sentence for aggravated child molestation.

His crime: receiving consensual oral sex from a 15-year-old female schoolmate.

More info here.

Why, implement cowsay in a PHP-emulated CLI environment! Yes,  I am a geek with no life. Small glitch with the script: it can’t handle spaces (has to do with the way it interprets the input), so if you want to write a sentence, use_underscores.

Keep in mind the source when watching this. It’s pretty well known that tuition fees have increased far beyond inflation. Was post-secondary education simply just too cheap in the eighties? Is there more to this? Or is it a question of the Ontarian government going the wrong direction? In any case, it has some pretty damning footage of Dalton McGuinty.

How do you kill a blog you love? By forcing it’s owner to hire an attorney, because you decided to sue someone who posted a comment for slander. That’s pretty much what’s happening here, with the popular blog ShoeMoney.

I hope to God that this is a small part of a much larger picture: a multi-faceted slander case.