Posts

Posted on

De-spamming using MTB

BTW I strongly recommend to make use of the new de-spamming feature in MTB 2.x:

Instead of just deleting a spam comment on your blog, rather click on the comment’s de-spam link (displayed at the bottom of the comment in the admin interface) or on the according de-spam link in your comment notification e-mail message. The latter is probably the most convenient way to report a spam comment to the master blacklist. See Neil’s World – MT-Blacklist 2.0 RC6 Screenshots for some more information.

Spam is a distributed problem. Fighting spam is a community effort.

Posted on

Mozilla Thunderbird and line wrapping

For the logs and Google: I just found out that Mozilla Thunderbird is pretty clever at handling line wrapping:

“To start with, Thunderbird/Mozilla is pretty cool because it really understands the text/plain; format=flowed content type. This means that you type paragraphs as one big line but the email gets sent with paragraphs wrapped at (something like) 72 characters. And then when you view it again, the line wrapping gets removed and paragraphs flow depending on the size of the viewer pane.”

(Source: madbean.com)

Posted on

FanWing

An interesting new technology for flight:

FanWing

Or as FanWing Ltd. calls it: “a revolution in flight technology” :)

Reminds me of another (even more revolutionary) interesting new flight technology, The Lifter Project. According to expectations, the efficiencies of these technologies are quite different. Whereas the FanWing
achieves an efficiency in the order of 20 g of lift per watt of input power, the best Lifters seem to achieve a lift efficiency of about 0.64 g/w (DC, not pulsed) and 2.55 g/w in theory (pulsed DC)

Posted on

MT-3.11

I’ve just upgraded to Movable Type 3.11 which once again comes with amazingly many new features, among others dynamic PHP publishing, post scheduling and sub-categories (full feature list).

I had to uninstall MT-Blacklist however (soon there will be a MT-3.11 plugin package that includes MTB). So far, my experiences with MTB have been pretty okay, though not overwhelmingly good. It deleted about 250 spam comment postings and forced moderation of about 35 comments (which were spam, mostly). The disadvantage of MTB’s approach is that fighting spam still consumes a considerable amount of time as it can’t fully prevent spam from being posted, just from being displayed. So I still had to watch out for new spam commments and manually delete them. I’d probably prefer approaches like those “real human” comment filters such as SCode or HumanVerify. I haven’t tested their effectiveness and efficiency yet however. And as a major drawback, these solutions aren’t very friendly in regard to web accessibility (visually handicapped people). The latter issue could eventually be solved by adding a dynamically generated sound sample of the displayed numbers.