Talk about your bad, stereo-type affirming PR. Someone outta be fired.

‘Cause you know, none of the protesters would ever insult another religion.

And I guess Lego won’t be producing that Prophet Muhammad set anytime soon.

I love how that Iranian [...]]]> If it weren’t for the violence, the Muslim protests over ‘caricatures’ would just be hilarious.

Talk about your bad, stereo-type affirming PR. Someone outta be fired.

‘Cause you know, none of the protesters would ever insult another religion.

And I guess Lego won’t be producing that Prophet Muhammad set anytime soon.

I love how that Iranian newpaper is having a competition for Holocaust cartoons. They obviously don’t get it — is anyone going to care beyond the spectacle of it now? Anyone can say anything they want if they want to sound like an idiot. And then people are free to judge them as such. So, don’t like the caricatures? Cancel your Danish newspaper subscription and write a letter to the editor. They clearly don’t read too many Western newspapers and see how often all religions are (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly) insulted.

I do admire that some countries stick to their principles, as illogical as they are, and cut off trade with Denmark over the differences. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could look past the $$ and stick it China, various Middle East oil producing states, and any number of other countries until their human rights standards were raised to acceptable levels? Of course I’m a hypocrite and consume as much as the next person.

I got sick and tired of the comment spam over the past few weeks. I guess once you’ve been identified as using open [...]]]> Spammers, you can fuck off and die. Of course, you’re not likely to be reading this since it’s your automated scripts that are doing the dirty work, but the point stands.

I got sick and tired of the comment spam over the past few weeks. I guess once you’ve been identified as using open commenting on a common blog system (in my case, b2evolution) it doesn’t take long before you’re completely inundated. I did a pretty good job of deleting them daily, so you may not have even seen any of the offending posts.

The anti-spam feature of b2evolution turned out to be pretty useless; the central blacklist that we can check against and submit to is a nice idea, but there’s just countless new domains popping up. The next logical measure was to turn off commenting except for registered users (not that anyone is posting legitimate comments nowadays, though). Unbelievably, after much searching in the admin tool and the rest of the Interweb, nothing like this seemed to exist! Even just a simple thing like disabling comments for everyone is only done on a post-by-post basis.

I decided to check out the code myself and luckily enough the changes I wanted were fairly easy to make. So for any other frustrated souls out there, hopefully the following is useful.

The first step was to foil the comment-posting bots. You may have already tried renaming your htsrv directory and some other steps to prevent them from posting directly to the post-handling programs, but even that only works for so long. But either way, make this change to your comment_post.php

if( is_logged_in() )
{ // User is logged in, we'll use his ID
$author_ID = $current_User->ID;
$author = NULL;
$email = NULL;
$url = NULL;
}
else
{	// User is not logged in, we need some id info from him:
// NEW - add error message if not logged in
errors_add( T_('Only registered users may post comments') );
// NEW - comment out everything else if not logged in
/*	$author_ID = NULL;
if ($require_name_email)
{ // Blog wants Name and EMail with comments
if( empty($author) )
errors_add( T_('Please fill in the name field') );
if( empty($email) )
errors_add( T_('Please fill in the email field') );
}
if( (!empty($email)) && (!is_email($email)) )
{
errors_add( T_('Supplied email address is invalid') );
}
 add 'http:' if no protocol defined for URL
$url = ((!stristr($url, '://'))
&& ($url != '')) ? 'http://' . $url : $url;
if( strlen($url) < 7 ){
$url = '';
}
if( $error =
validate_url( $url, $comments_allowed_uri_scheme ) )
{
errors_add( T_('Supplied URL is invalid: ') . $error );
}
*/
}

Really simple! If the user is not logged in, add the error message and comment out the rest (or delete, but it’s nice leaving in the original code for later reference if need be). By flagging the error, this will prevent code later in the file from adding the comment to the database.

It’s been the better part of a week since I made this change, and the spam-free existence has been wonderful!

Now, if you want to be real user-friendly about things, recall that on the default comment page if the person is not logged in they can leave a comment as a ‘Visitor’. If they go to the trouble of typing up a nice long message for you and hit submit, the above change will present them with the new error message. It might be nice to warn them beforehand and not waste their time.

So in this next bit, I’ll describe (the code is too long to copy, paste, & format properly, so just read carefully) a few changes to make to your skins/_feedback.php file. Find the section that begins with

<!-- form to add a comment -->

Move the following

<form action=...
<input type= ....
<input type= ....

a few lines below, to within and above the existing contents of the block that starts with

if( is_logged_in() )
{ // User is logged in:

Then, after this IF-ELSE block is the rest of the HTML for the comment form. Cut everything form form_textarea( ... all the way down to where you find the </form> tag and paste it within the if( is_logged_in() ) block, below what was already there. Finally, within the ELSE portion of the block, comment out or delete what was already there and do something like

else
{ // User is not loggued in:
?>
<div class="bComment"><p>Only registered users may submit comments.
</p></div>
<?php
}

If you still want to allow anonymous comments in some fashion, this is what I did: I created another, dummy, user account and put the login and password info in my message above. It’s a bit more work for the user, but if they’re really against registering then this still gives them the option to post. And if this setup gets abused, it’s easy enough to just delete the dummy account.

Hopefully I’ve described everything clear enough, but if you have any questions then feel free to contact me. I’d be happy to help in your fight against spam.

When people, [...]]]> A bit of a timeout here before I get on with more FilmFest posts about actual movies. For the most part, the audiences have been stellar … well behaved, polite, enthusiastic in showing their support, etc. Of course, that doesn’t mean I don’t have a second installment of Things That Annoy Steve:

When people, as part of laughing at a joke, repeat the joke outloud. This includes immediately reticing a funny bit of dialogue and laughing at the same time, and also describing the action that lead to the humor, as if we need some sort of commentator to explain the funny scenarios. Thank you annoying lady who sat to my left earlier today.

People who repeatedly try to double-click hyperlinks.

It took me almost 25 minutes to get the rep on the phone to understand the situation. [...]]]> Thoughts of a Rogers-free existence proved to be premature. A couple of days ago a charge for July services was posted to my credit card, despite the fact that it was all cancelled at the end of June.

It took me almost 25 minutes to get the rep on the phone to understand the situation. She had some mental block that made her think the recent charge was for my June services and that I would receive a ‘Final’, zero dollar bill. I had to walk her through my previous bill, showing it was for June service and paid over a month ago.

I could understand if the bill generated at the end of last month didn’t reflect the cancelled service, but there’s no way that the billing system should have charged me two weeks after cancellation. She finally clued in as to what was going on, and said a refund cheque would be mailed out. Mailed because they are no longer authorized to post to my credit card. I should get it in 6-8 weeks. Bullshit. I’m not waiting two months for a $70 mistake on their end. She’s supposed to call back within the hour with a better answer.

UPDATE: there’s now a credit applied to my card, pending until the beginning of August. Two weeks is better than two months. But get this, the amount is actually for $0.90 more than what I’m owed, because of “how taxes are calculated” in the system. What the hell kind of system is that? Oh well, I’ll take the ninety cents for my trouble.

It’s a nice idea that with a concerted effort and focus from the world’s well-off that we could actually do something to “eliminate” poverty. But after the warm-fuzziness of such [...]]]> I’ve got a backlog of posts to put up here, but I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the whole Live 8 thing.

It’s a nice idea that with a concerted effort and focus from the world’s well-off that we could actually do something to “eliminate” poverty. But after the warm-fuzziness of such notions wears off, what exactly do we mean by it? Do we have to come up with some international standard that defines poverty? Because there’s certainly a big difference between a low-income family in Canada that is considered to be living in poverty (say, by Statistics Canada) and some of the African families spotlighted this weekend. So as a nation, are we willing to say to our less well-off citizens that they should just suck it up while we send aid to the “real” poor and desperate?

In any case, it’s going to be that “haves” that decide what gets doled out to the “have-nots”. How much are people really prepared to part with, because such a monumental undertaking doesn’t happen for free — will they give up part of their share of the pie? What happens if we define an acceptable standard of living and find we don’t have the resources to attain it for 6+ billion people?

Anyway, here are some highlights from the media. In the irony category, we have this (link):

By end of day, irate food vendors outside the gates were reporting huge losses and hundreds of hotdogs and buns had to be thrown away. The vendors say the losses were because of the numerous vendors who operated without permits.

Once we have that poverty thing taken care of, we’ll tackle educational standards and media awareness (link):

Marty Gradwell from Whitby, Ont., said he came to the Canadian gig “to rock out and enjoy the start of a warm summer.”

Asked what prompted the worldwide music extravaganza, he could only venture a guess.

“For AIDS in Afghanistan, is it?”

May Marty be forever Google-y associated with his firm grasp of the world around him.