Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Trans-cendant
Spam killed me.
More precisely, the uber-geniuses at BlewHost suspended me because I was the victim of a spam attack. Reminds me of the time I was five and I got into my dad’s razors (back when razors were double-sided, and you had to verrrrry carefully mount them into your razor holder thingie) and slashed up a finger, and my dad told my mom that she should clean me up, get a band aid on it, and bring me back for a spanking. Excuse me? I just learned my lesson, thank you very much. As I recall, I made my point as succinctly and clearly as a five-year-old under threat of spanking could, and I escaped corporal punishment.
But not this time. Not only am I slammed by porn-spammers, but then the shvanzwads at Blewhost suspend me without warning, and it takes me THREE calls before I finally get someone who can tell me what to do.
The first two guys told me I would have to delete all my comments and then disable the blog to new comments. (Um, hey guys? You do know what a blog is, right?) One of the two convinced me to eliminate most of my plug-ins.
The last guy figured out the problem and guided me to the proper spot in cPanel. Five thousand deleted files later, my blog is up and running.
These porn-spams were interesting. Most linked to a site with transsexual-labia in the URL, and the commenter’s names all had ‘trans’ in them. Here, I saved several:
Illinois department of trans
Where can I buy a Pontiac Trans Am
Trans Oceanic Shipping
Jansport Trans Backpack
Trans Siberia Orchestra
Trans Link Golden Gate Transit
and best of all
Trans Canada
I would like to hurt these spammers. I would like to send 1000 Jehovah’s Witnesses and 10,000 Mormons to their doors. I would like to spam them with ads for the latest Amy Grant CD. I would like for them to become targets of our national legislature’s top moral watchdogs, Senator Larry “I am not gay” Craig and Senator David “Diaper Boy” Vitter.
But I’ll be content if I can reinstall my plug-ins.
D.
That sucks, but I’m glad to see you back online.
Don’t you use Askimet for spam protection?
I did, but I never realized that I was supposed to periodically delete the “saved” spam trapped by Akismet. Now I’m trying to reinstall Akismet, and I’m not sure why I’m having such a hard time of it. I uploaded the folder, so it SHOULD show up in my plug-ins directory, but it’s not.
So was this all spam that Akismet missed?
Something doesn’t add up in blewhost’s story, I’m afraid.
I thought Akismet automatically deleted spam after x number of days. Mine does anyway.
Or, as Dean asked, was it all spam that Akismet missed?
I’d just like to know what our national highway has to do with any of it…
Hiya, Doug! *smoochies*
All of this is above my head/knowledge of what spam can do to a blog.
By the way, you pretty much ALWAYS escaped corporal punishment.
Glad you straightened out the mess.
Oh, hey! My comment posted! I got an error message when I submitted it, so I assumed that WP eated it.
Dean, Dan, I suspect you’re right. But I’m not techie enough to figure out what DID happen. I never saw any of these spams actually showing up in the comments, though — only in my comment database.
Kris, smoochies back at ya.
Sis, they made up for it with psychological warfare.
ps: go figure π
I had site down issues at Blewhost as well, due to spam traffic. Argh. Glad you’re back up!
yay, i’m glad you’re back on this site π
Me too, shains.
welcome back..
Perhaps if your father had spanked you more often you wouldn’t have grown up to be such a spam magnet.
Hi Doug. Sorry to hear about those troubles. Welcome back from the dark side!
I love the line about the JW’s and Mormons, though.
Back Hooray!
glad u back, happened to me b4
Thanks, folks. By the way, if you’re getting weird error messages when you post a comment, you’re not alone. I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress last night, so hopefully that problem is solved.
I went through something similar last weekend — took three or four calls to get turned back on, and then I had to delete my Coppermine installation to get them to agree to that.
Same hosting service, BTW.
Still getting the error messages. Looks like a plug-in is not compatible.
Oh bummer! and I totally agree about already being pubished. Parents just don’t know when to stop, lol.
I sometimes wish I was a computer hacker, so I could enter a spammer’s computer and wreck havoc.
Well, it’s a nice dream.
Now, this is interesting: my blogroll has disappeared.
Was it Yosemite Sam who used to curse, “Rassafrassa rassafrassa” etc? That’s how I feel about all these glitches . . .
Looks like you got at least one of your plugins working. I just got pinged by three old messages in which you had linked to me. π
Let’s see if the error-after-commenting is still around…
Error-after-commenting is still around. It mentions “Ringtone” and “Nokia” in the error. Could there be a rogue spambot or something installed in your blog causing the problem?
Maybe it’s your spam busting plugin that’s causing the Regex ID error?
Just a test comment so I can look at the error. (BTW, Thunderfail won’t let me send out eMail, so I can’t reply to eMail right now.)
Here are the errors:
Regex ID: 12845 (Ringtone) appears to be an invalid regex string! Please fix it in the Blacklist control panel.
Regex ID: 12903 (Nokia) appears to be an invalid regex string! Please fix it in the Blacklist control panel.
I don’t know of anything like that for Akismet, so I’m guessing maybe it’s with the Spam Karma 2 plugin? (I don’t use that one, so I don’t know anything about it.) Does it have a Blacklist tab or control panel in your Admin?
There is a blacklist built into WordPress, but all it does (AFAIR) is place any comment containing the word into the spam queue.
output started at /home/ballsand/public_html/wp-content/plugins/SK2/sk2_util_class.php:208
Yah, it’s Spam Karma. It might not be fully compatible with the latest version of WP. I’d disable it and re-enable Akismet.
I disabled Spam Karma, and it looks like that did the job. Thanks! Now I’m depending entirely on Akismet to keep me spam-free. Hope it’s up to the task.
No one has given any suggestions as to why the tranny porn spammers felt the need to put “trans” in their name π
It’s all about Teh Google.
Hiya! What a pain in the butt. Good to see you back. Got worried there for a bit.