Spam, Ham: What do you do with over 1000 of them in your comments queue?

After New Year, I came back to a huge glut of spam in my database! I hadn’t configured a standard plugin because I thought the blog would go relatively unnoticed! Boy! Was I wrong or what? The queue contained over 1000 spams, that didn’t include spam in my comment plugin either.

spam I am

So how do you deal with a huge queue of spam like that? I spent ages clicking page after page when I realized that I was doing it the stupid way.

Stage 1: Filter the spam properly

  • Step 1: Install Akismet in your plugins. You can either download it from the website or search within your plugins “Add New” option and add it or upload it.
  • Step 3: Activate Akismet, then go to the Akismet Configuration Page under Plugins submenu. In the space, enter your API Key and check automatically discard.

Stage 2: Check for spam in the Pending Queue

check for spam

Step 4: Once Akismet is activated, head to the comments page, where you will see a button clearly marked “Check for Spam”. Hit it. If the Spam queue is long, it may take a while to get through the queue or your server may time out. Just refresh the comments page. If necessary repeat.

Step 5: Get the plugin called Clear Spam in which “…adds an option to clear spam messages from the WordPress database” under the Comments section right next to the “Check for Spam” button. On my server it caused a couple of Server 500 errors but it did work after a refresh.

delete spam

But after cleaning the spam out, all gone!

all gone

Stage 3: Prevention is better than cure

Stage 6: Akismet works very well on filtering comments out so that your queue is empty, but it does very little to prevent spam. And it does remove spam after 30 days or so automatically, so you really shouldn’t see any. But…

Stage 7: Install Lester Chan’s wonderful plugin called IP Ban which in his words helps you to “Ban users by IP, IP Range, host name, user agent and referer url from visiting your WordPress’s blog. It will display a custom ban message when the banned IP, IP range, host name, user agent or referer url tries to visit you blog. You can also exclude certain IPs from being banned.” One word of warning: do not enter your own IP Address in the Banned IP address box. You will have a lot of trouble to restore your own access!

ip ban options

Stage 8: Enter the IP addresses that you are being spammed from. This is the option that I mostly use because I find that these addresses generate the most vicious and most frequent comment spams. You can use my list, but you will also be able to buttress it with your own list of IP addresses, too.

194.8.75.*
194.165.42.*
87.118.118.133
91.121.21.190
64.87.9.82

Drop me a note with some other common IPs so I can ban them, too!

Note the use of wildcards (in this case, an asterisk) to deter users from any of these IP addresses. Be careful: you may ban too many users if you use too many asterisks! If you don’t know what you are doing, just stick with Akismet until you understand more about the Internet!

The proof is in the pudding.

In the time that it has taken me to write this posting for EeeBlogger, you will see that IP Ban has already prevented at least four comment spams. Yes, it tracks stats, too! Take a look.

banned stats

A final note: You may feel tempted, esp. to read through the comments to make sure there aren’t real comments being misidentified. Do not be tempted to click on any of the links in the spam to find out what it takes you to. I had a harrowing experience a few months ago when I did that out of curiosity. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. Seriously. Don’t even think about. If you do, you will be taken through numerous redirects, stuff will be loaded on your PC, your anti-virus will be disabled, and your PC will be compromised. So don’t.

What’s your experience with Spam? What plugins do you use? Drop me a line…

Saturday’s News: Payperpost Campaigns, FaceBook, Forbes and NT$

This week’s been quite an odd week for InvestorBlogger (and me!). It started off with me sitting under an A/C on a cold evening after an unusually warm day. Of course, the next day, I started to feel ‘blah!’… turns out I had probably a viral infection! That has kept me hacking away like a 20-a-day smoker over the last few days! I managed to struggle on, until yesterday when a class of eight 2nd-grade boys was almost too much!

PayPerPost Generates Interest

campaign2

Apart from that, I did find time to run my second campaign with PayPerPost. (See the graphic!). I ran it on a Friday, which may not have been the best decision. But I did note an improvement in the quality of the posts after making several tweaks to the language of the post: including a note that I would award tacks on the quality of the posting, and that I would review every post personally.

I was quite horrified by the first post in the first campaign, but the problems have been rectified and overall, I would say that the campaign was a good success. Did it produce any additional traffic? Well, one produced the lion’s share of traffic, but there were seven visitors so far, and over 450 views of the articles. These are the short term results, there will be an additional SEO benefit, and future traffic as well when articles are broadly syndicated and read.

There are some changes I would still make to the next campaign: first, I’d include an image for visual impact, second, I’d try to time it with an announcement, and third I’d definitely rectify the title of the posts problem.

Updated Feed: New Feeds included in the new feed

I’ve managed to find some additional feeds for my favorite Make Money RSS Feeds, which I’ve just added to the download file, but there are still two empty slots… So I’m looking for more suggestions, just drop a suggestion in the contacts page, and I’ll check it out.

top feeds OPML overview

If you’re puzzled who’s in this download, what are you waiting for? There are seventeen, yes 17, great bloggers with lots of things to say about Investing, Tech, Making Money Online, etc.! It’s all great stuff! If you use even 50% of the bloggers suggestions, you’ll be a richer man or woman than Croesus! And it’s free! So if you don’t enjoy the download, I’ll give you double your money back!

IP Rights vs. FaceBook

Yesterday one of my friends ran this great article on FaceBook and your IP Rights. It’s well worth reading if you use FaceBook or syndicate any content there with your permission, or plan to. Here’s a juicy quote:

Facebook forces you to grant it the same rights as you would if you uploaded the content to their servers. In other words, they can change, modify and sell the work without requiring the consent of the creator.

Do read the article. Though my own photos aren’t valuable like Craig’s, I’d like to know that I still have 100% control over where, how and when they appear. This is why I host my photos largely on my own sites, if at all. I don’t think I have the quality yet to show off commercially.

But still they are MY photos. Not Facebook’s. Speak about overarching TOS. If you are going to use FaceBook, limit your photos to very low quality pictures that can’t be used commercially, but look okay on a screen that size. If you don’t upload high quality images, you will not find them being used. So use your commonsense. Just as you wouldn’t walk down the street wearing your finest gold watch for all to see, dressed to the nine’s in your DAKS suit, etc.. so you should remember that being on FaceBook is akin to walking in public, and you can be robbed IP-wise in a number of ways. So don’t wear your finest!

Forbes’ New Billionaires: New Wealth vs. Traditional Industries

And in more general news, Forbes published a new list of Billionaires with some interesting changes. The developing world is beginning to create new wealth, and many of the wealthy-to-be will knock the socks off the old world wealth by the staggering size and speed with which their wealth was accumulated. More interesting, though, was how traditional businesses were overcoming tech wealth as tech fortunes sagged, and more diversified interests did well. Take a look at the latest billionaire’s report on Forbes.

Other changes include the number of billionaires who do not reside in their country of citizenship. But, in Taiwan, there were seven wealthy individuals, all of whom live here: Tsai Hong-tu & family; Terry Gou; YC Wang & family; Tsai Wan-Tsai & family; Douglas Hsu; Tsai Eng Meng; and Barry Lam.

NT$: Inflation vs. Exports

Also, recent weakness in the US$ vs the NT$ has meant a nearly 5% improvement for our undervalued currency here. This largely is the result of the current government keeping the currency weak as a way to increase exports and fend off competition from China. But the direct result has been that increasing commodity prices in many areas has resulted in inflationary pressure in Taiwan on many everyday products and commodities. Most recently, eggs jumped by more than 10% in a few days; flour has gone up hugely, etc.. The government is now strengthening the currency to ease inflationary pressure amid popular demand just before the presidential election on March 22nd. It’s going to be good for a number of reasons, though, as most commodities are priced in US$.

TV over IP: CHT’s MOD virtually stillborn

100 1662As you know, InvestorBlogger lives in Taiwan. This can be both an exciting and a frustrating experience, often at the same time. A good example of this is MOD TV, which is the topic of this post. MOD is in fact a form of IPTV , which routes a compressed TV signal across the Internet to settop boxes that decode and display the signal as a form of interactive TV.

So this article introduces TV over IP. It still fairly new in Europe and the US, but it’s been available in Japan for quite some time (years!) and in Taiwan for more than 2 years. In fact, one of my customers was in fact a senior designer for Setabox who are a major manufacturer of TV set top boxes (see graphic). But now it is being adopted in many countries, especially those that already have sufficient broadband capabilities and a ready market.

Getting Connected

100 1661

In the middle of last year, our building was offered FTTB (Fiber to the building) and suddenly we were able to upgrade our Internet speeds by leaps and bounds. In addition, there was a new feature called MOD. We had long since given up on cable TV, so we opted to try this as an alternative to getting a satellite dish.

In this article, I’ll be introducing the system we have, outlining the benefits of how it is implemented in Taiwan, as well as the pitfalls. Naturally, I’ll be looking at the content as much as the system.

When you turn on the system, you have to remember there are now three boxes that need to be working: your router, your settop box, and your TV! In addition, there are two remotes. Both of these make things a little more complex than they need otherwise be. Setup is straightforward for people with computing skills and who can connect up a pc without much difficulty. But for people challenged by a DVD player, the solution is somewhat trickier.

The Basics

Once on, though, there are two halves, albeit integrated, the first is TV of which we have a selection of 31 or so base channels; and Interactive TV, which includes subscriptions, MOD, VOD, music, banking and games, etc.. To toggle between them is relatively easy, you just hit the toggle switch on the remote.

100 1665

As you will see from the first image, the separate ‘channels’ are listed in sidebar down the lefthand side of the page with movies at the top, dramas, National Geographic, etc. The process for selecting each VOD is pretty similar. In the graphic on the right, you will see the Movies area with the listings on the right. When you click on a movie, you’ll be taken to a page that displays the basic information, along with pricing.

Occasionally, you will have to enter a code for an 18+ movie. You will get a choice of watching a preview or ordering the movie. Once movies are ordered, you have to watch them within 72 hours; but you can pause and return later to watch the rest.

There are other areas that offer similar functionality as Movies with specialized programming, such as the ever popular Hong Kong or Korean dramas (typically 40 or 50 episodes that can be watched over 7 days – my wife loves those!), health, sports – baseball, music, etc..

There are of course password, settings and account information all in their own areas within the menus. Overall, it is a comprehensive system that offers flexibility, variety, some user control, and affordability.

100 1664However, as fairly experienced users of the system, and not particularly unsavvy, either. We offer a number of important criticisms of the service as offered by Hinet, many of which make the service of limited value. Perhaps this is why the service is bundled as part of an ADSL package these days, CHT knows it cannot sell this is an acceptable alternative.

It’s pluses are quite important. But the downsides severely limit the pluses, so much so that the value of the entire service is brought into question.

ngcUnusual Variety

However, my wife enjoyes the variety and range of movies that MOD currently offers. She has subscribed to a channel within the service that offers a kind of ‘All You Can Watch’ deal and she gets to see quite unusual movies, movies that would not otherwise make it on TV here, or even the video store: European (particularly French and German), Middle Eastern, Korean and Japanese movies, as well as low budget Taiwanese movies. Some of them are pretty good, too. I found several channels that I liked to watch a lot: Australia Network (now cancelled), CNBC (also cancelled), and Soundtrack Channel among them. We both enjoy the ability to watch movies at convenient times, and not having to go to the video store on a rainy night!

The downsides we discovered are quite considerable, though, and we have on several occasions thought about canceling the service altogether. But we’re too busy to complain that much.

Stability

The set-top box is manufactured in Taiwan, with technology from Microsoft. We’re quite willing to give new technology a go, but we have noticed that the software isn’t all that stable, as it occasionally just freezes or has to be manually rebooted. This is very frustrating at times, and doesn’t create much confidence in us! Oddly, though, the network is pretty stable and seldom causes problems: we have sufficient bandwidth for highspeed browsing AND TV services. I daresay we could do even more with FTTB.

System Limitations

100 1663The service has a number of limitations that are particularly disappointing to users: sub-channels are often used to broadcast alternate soundtracks (usually in the original language), but in MOD they are just simply not rebroadcast. Many programs therefore only have the primary dubbing, esp. foreign language movies that have been dubbed into Taiwanese or Mandarin; sound quality of foreign language movies is often very poor due to the high degree of compression used, often the volume has to be increased to make sense of the sound details; subtitles, as used in DVDs, are all missing, so we are unable to watch a French movie with English subtitles, we’re stuck with Chinese subtitles; picture quality often is lower quality, this is not HD tv, so I doubt it would play well on large screen TVs at all, at best you would get very grainy pictures.

Programming Quality

There isn’t a great range of TV on the service, so it is not an effective replacement for Cable TV. There are about 14 digital channels anyway in Taiwan, and the service carries most of those terrestrial digital channels. Other than that, most of the other channels are just low quality equivalents of popular TV channels here, either rehashing mainstream news channels, or replaying videos from years ago. Moreover, since we got the service last year, the channels have changed several times with the expiration of channel broadcasting contracts. One channel was cut for a while and two more quality channels have permanently disappeared. The remainder is largely just junk: channels created to fill a space in the programming schedule; channels that don’t cost that much to run because they don’t ‘generate’ revenue for the service.

Video-on-Demand Quality100 1670

This service shows regularly some good quality movies that have finished their DVD run, but by then who hasn’t seen most of these new movies! Most of the rest of the movies are European movies, classic movies (often out of copyright in Taiwan), and other very low budget made for TV movies, with bad scripts, bad actors, and so on (get the picture!). You can find good movies here, but you have to wade through a lot of junk to find them.

Additional Services

atmThere are additional services provided in the MOD service, including KTV, banking, adult movies (sure to be a moneyspinner), video calls, etc. Unfortunately, most of these are hampered by similar problems: serious limitations, lack of quality control, desire to save money, and poor product substitution. In fact, go to MOD’s webpage and checkout the programming to see for yourself. Unlike digital broadcasting in the UK, there are no radio stations on MOD, no regional TV channels, no rebroadcasts of popular shows, very little music (other than KTV channels), no major sports channels (other than baseball), … CHT have not been able to make much headway with content deals with anything other than the odd distributor. Worse, due to local laws the MOD cannot rebroadcast TV channels, other than the digital TV channels which are terrestrial. Local private channels like ETTV or TVBS or any of the other major channels are unable at this time to do deals with CHT. Naturally, this does not make the situation any better.

Conclusion

My assessment of this service is quite simple. As it stands, CHT is asking customers to pay around NT$150 a month for a service to your house that includes sub-standard TV channels, low quality broadcasts (both content and technology-wise), and poor services. In many cases, even if you buy the so-called higher quality programs – you can’t subscribe to any more TV channels – you are still stuck with second-rate movies, second-rate TV shows and seriously limited choices.

CHT should, in all seriousness, be paying people to take the basic service because, as it stands, it wouldn’t be viable except as a subsidized service. If the quality of programming were there, it wouldn’t have to cheapskate itself as it currently is. Because I love my highspeed ADSL, I probably will keep IPTV for the meantime: my wife enjoys the occasional drama series and movie, I still can watch Bloomberg (I guess).

As an emerging technology, though, IPTV offers considerable potential for new TV channels to bypass the traditional distribution markets and reach out directly to consumers and viewers. Joost is trying this, as are a number of other independent broadcasters. Naturally, the big broadcasters will want to control as much of this as possible, but if the new broadcasters create new content, there won’t be as much control as on the Napsters of the music world! What companies will you invest in to take advantage of this new technology? Do you see it as having a bright future or not? Let’s hear it!