« Rock experts baffled | Main | Evolution in action »
Sorry if you noticed that the Prattle was down briefly earlier today. This is because of Guy McFarland, a child pornographer and comment spammer whose address is 4009 Dancing Cloud Ct, Destin, FL 32541-3388, USA. His phone number is apparently 850-269-2814, but his voicemail is full (I wonder why?). I have a low opinion of the sort of person who steal someone else's resources to advertise their commercial enterprises--it makes no difference to me how dubious those enterprises are. But, I am a pacifist, and would never ever think it appropriate to do violence to anyone, and I remember occasions where fake registration information has been used as a means of getting revenge upon an innocent party. I do hope that Florida does not suffer from a vigilante problem, and I've heard worrying things about the treatment of child abusers in US prisons.
I'm afraid if you are a legitimate user of Utah ISP SISNA/Ikano Communications, where the comment spam originated, you will not be able to comment here as the spammers were using a whole range of their IP addresses, so we blocked the lot. More discussion on this issue at Electrolite.
Posted in
Administrivia
at 16:31. Last modified on September 28 2006 at 23:43.
Permalink to this entry | View blog reactions
Comments
1: Posted by: Charlie Stross | October 12, 2003 4:52 PM
This is by way of testing the newly upgraded Movable Type engine I've just installed (leaping with one bound from version 2.51 to 2.64) in anticipation of tomorrow's release of MT-Blacklist. If it shows up okay (like this :) ) then it means the Prattle is on course for bulletproof anti-spamming defenses within 24 hours.
Grr.
Yr hmbl sysadmin
-- Charlie
2: Posted by: John Anderson | October 14, 2003 5:35 PM
see http://windsofchange.net/archives/004141.html
For MT: *Solution for comments spams* "To cut the story short, I wrote a plugin to MT that will verify if it is a human before it allows comments to be posted. The idea is pretty simple: Display an image with a Security Code and demand the user to enter [that] Security Code manually before allowing posting to go through." See http://www.captcha.net/ for possible updates.
*killing_comment_spam_dead*
3: Posted by: Feòrag | October 14, 2003 5:39 PM
It's already installed...
4: Posted by: Feòrag | October 14, 2003 5:43 PM
Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist, that is. I try not to deliberately discriminate against people with disabilities so the image approach is completely inappropriate for this site.
Evangelism, witnessing and similar activitites go by one name here—, and is no different from spam for viagra, penis enlargement products and pornography. We do not take advertising. If you want to advertise your imaginary friend, please spend your own money on your own web space to do so. Any attempts to use the comments section for advertisements will be deleted, and the perpetrator barred, unless they are particularly stupid, in which case I reserve the right to pinch an idea from Teresa Nielsen Hayden and delete all the vowels.
This is not a contacts site. If you are looking for help regarding a particular path, I suggest The Witches' Voice, which does operate a contacts service.
Allowed HTML:
a href, b, br, p, strong, em, ol, ul, li, blockquote, q, pre. If your name has accents in it, things will work better if you use the XHTML entities for those letters. The same applies if you are using a word processor to compose your comment, then copying and pasting the text—either turn off curly quotes and avoid using em-dashes, or edit your comment after pasting to get rid of them. Garbled comments usually get deleted.