Five ways to reduce spam in your Comments — From my perspective

With there being so many different ways to rid you self from comment spam. I figured I would suggest some ways to help reduce your spam. On Growmaps Post about Akismet, We were discussing some ways to help reduce spam in her comment moderation and I wanted to post about what I use to help reduce the bots from posting. Anyone can do this because of all the problems we are having with Akismet, I have disabled that on my blog and I haven’t looked back yet.

Having been working to minimize my spam intake.   I have talked about about some email spam problems in the past.  Although there are many reasons why you get spam, the main reason is for someone trying to make money from something they want you to buy or even install!!

As you can see that image I have up shows you the type of spam I get and you probably like me asking yourself why are they trying to leave those comments.   I think I know but this is to help those who might want to get rid of some of the most common comment spam.

• Bad Behavior Plugin — I am using this plugin with conjunction with my Project Honey Pot to help harvest those bad guys.   This little plugin works in conjunction with Project Honey Pot to determine if it is posting same comments from the same IP.  You will need http:BL API Key to get Bad Behavior to talk to each other.


• Project Honey Pot — You should understand, there are more than the API KEY.   I installed a few Honeypots on my server to help other content management systems administrators help collect data of possible comment spammers.  This helps others who are trying to fight spam see if there are other sites that this IP is commenting on!!  The more who sign up and install their own honeypots the better off the community is in the long run.


• WP-Recaptcha — Now this works with logins and Comments to help reduce the amount of possible bots.   Although it is somewhat harder for comments to be written by a true person.   This helps reduce bots but won’t reduce them to much.   You should also protect your Wp-admin subdirectory by using this to help detour scripts from dictionary attacking your password.


• WP-BAN –  This is proactive solution from just sitting back and doing nothing.   Here you can watch spam and figure out which IP’s are making the most comment spams and prevent them from even accessing your website.   This is great because this will alert the user who has an infected system that can’t access your site and to email the admin.   I haven’t had one of the banned IPS to send me email yet.   So either they don’t want to get on my blog or they are just bots.


• Comment Spamtrap — This is almost like Project Honey Pot but instead these are hidden to all real users and bots who fill in these forms are reading from HTML and not from the screen. If you fill in all the forms then you will be consider a spammer. So it automatically deletes them or marks them as spam. These are the one that I use to help detour spam bots.

You have to understand in order to fight spam you have to find more than one way to block spam.   I will not be going back to Akismet because I feel I fight back with spam and figure block the ones that I know are spam commenter.     You got to give your comments almost a firewall for bots to get past to get to post comments but there are no guarantees that this will work on all blogs but I do think it is working well with me because of the spam I haven’t gotten in the past few months.   I hope this blog post has helped you and if you know a blogger who is having problems with spam send them to this page.

Have a Good Monday, See you Wednesday!!

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Cellular Modem common problem -- DNS LOOKUP

With Cellular Modems being used more and more, the common problem is:



Address not Found

This is something that comes with any ISP the DNS lookup problem. In which your connection acts like a VPN connection, it connects to a cell tower and then gets transported to the nears server and then goes on the internet. The Server does the DNS lookup for you and send you to the right page. There seems to be a problem with my Cellular DNS server because it doesn't have a complete list and if it doesn't know where you to go you get that screen.

[ad#cricket-right-ez]So I found an easy way to fix this problem. I have been using my Host file to tell my computer the IP of the server that I am having the problem. So how do I find out the Ip of the server? This can be a problem to an extent.

I found that visiting the OpenDns.com Cache check will tell me the internet protocol of the server for the time but it could change. I just edit the host file manually and insert the need information by hand. Like I said the IP may change from time to time depending on where you are going or if it is a big server. The servers ip will rotate to help the bandwidth and keep it even on all servers, so this only works with servers that have a Static IP.

There is a program that will help you manage your host file it's called Hostman and this does makes editing your Host file a little more easily. I have used this and I haven't found anything that does do anywhere better than this. If you have a suggestion on a good Host Manager, please tell people in the Forums or leave a comment. I'd love to hear some good programs to help update the Host file more easily.

Using Skype with Cellular BroadBand Modems

If your like me you will want to make sure you have the best possible speed and connection with your broad band modem. Here are a few articles to better help with you get the best possible speed with a broad band modem like a Cricket modem:

• Cricket USB UM100 Broadband Wireless Modem Review.


• Get your Cricket Broadband to Activate Manually!


• Cricket Broad Band Modem Extended Review 12/23/08


• Cricket Wireless Broadband Card — How to get better speed!

Some other things to consider are:

• Getting better speeds from your Cellular broadband!


• Understanding a Cellular Modems

These will start to make it better for you to use a modem and get the best possible speeds from the modem.  You have to realize what your coverage area is.  There are many factors in regards to your modem speed but that is something that you will have to figure out how to get better speeds.

How do you use Skype with your Cellular broad band modem?

Somethings to remembers with your broadband modem is you won't have a good connection no matter how hard you try.   Most cellular carriers don't want you to us it with VOIP(Voice of Internet Protocol).   So you will have to pay close attention to how you use the bandwidth and what you are doing while making a VOIP call.

The good thing about Skype is, it comes with some very useful tools to better watch your bandwidth and to help get the best possible connection.  You will want to make sure not to have it be a super-node, to do this you go to:

Tools then;Options

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As you can see I checked off use port 80 and 443 as alternative incoming connections, I also like to see all the technical information and bandwidth usage per call.  I made sure to use Socks5 to prevent skype from becoming a super-node. I also have it set to not automatically start up when I load windows.  To do that all you have to do is go to the General tab and un-check start Skype when Windows start.   You can use any port you want as long as you use the same on the SOCKs5 setting also.   I just made the port up it can be 0 to 4 numbers long.   If you want to understand what ports are this little document will greatly help you figure out which ports are good to use.  Some other things to remember when you use Skype for long periods of time is if you need to call someone you should try not to use the internet to much for that takes bandwidth also.  It is better to have Skype use all the possible bandwidth you have available.

Microsoft Releases MS08-062 to the Public a Month Early!

Vulnerability in Windows Internet Printing Service Could Allow Remote Code Execution (KB953155)

This update resolves a privately reported vulnerability in the Windows Internet Printing Service that could allow remote code execution. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts.

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This update is rated Important for all supported editions of Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008. For more information, see the subsection, Affected and Non-Affected Software, in this section.

The security update addresses this vulnerability by changing the way that memory is allocated within the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) service. For more information about the vulnerability, see the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) subsection for the specific vulnerability entry under the next section, Vulnerability Information.

[via Microsoft Bulletin]

Now from what I understand, if you have a Network attached printer on your system this would make you more vulnerable to someone taking control over your system. So this patch is supposed to fix that. I am recommending to all to update this and fix this update ASAP. I do not know if you don't have one what that would do so just install this update, because you will undoubtedly still be runing the Internet Printer Protocol even if you don't have a printer.