Feb 22 2007
How video game RPGs helped me deal with blog spam
Akismet went ape-s$!t on me some time ago and I wasn’t paying attention. Somehow I ended up with enough blog spam to break the Wordpress “Awaiting Moderation”User Interface; there was so much spam (over 7600 blog spam comments) that I had delete them in batches of 30.
It was the same repetitive motion over and over: Select All, Delete, Confirm, Refresh. Select All, Delete, Confirm, Refresh. Select All, Delete, Confirm, Refresh… all the while flashing on my screen were phrases like these:
- Viagra Viagra Viagra Viagra Viagra
- Hey! If you like that, then you’ll totally dig my manga porn at …
- Viagra Viagra Viagra Viagra Viagra
- COme join our fiesta at cumfiesta…
- Viagra Viagra Viagra Viagra Viagra
- Love your design. Check out the Hot MILF’s at…
- Viagra Viagra Viagra Viagra Viagra
While I’m doing this insanely repetitive task of deleting spam (Select All, Delete, Confirm, Refresh) and thinking about giving up I remembered that once when I was young played a video game (Final Fantasy on the NES) for 6 hours just to level up my characters to the point where I could kill almost any bad guy in one or two rounds. Talk about insanely repetitive, I had my characters walking through the same small area over and over again and fighting the same bad guys over and over again just to gain more experience points. Hell, if I could to that when I was young then I can certainly knock this spam out.
After about an hour of work (Select All, Delete, Confirm, Refresh. Viagra Viagra Viagra Viagra Viagra. Select All, Delete, Confirm, Refresh.) I got down to under 1000 blog comments, the “Awaiting Moderation” function started working again, and I was able to delete the rest of the spam with two mouse clicks.
Since I do have access to my own server, I might try adjusting the file that drives Apache, or try re-installing Akismet. Either option would be better than doing this again.
Hey Bro welcome back to the blogosphere I found that the plugin spam karma has helped me greatly with the spam issue I get check it it out, also it me be less feasable for you to use this considering the dogs, but I gotta say I finally started using dragon naturally speaking 9 preffered to speed up the blogging process, and it works pretty well I have to correct and do some things by had of course, but it has increased my output speed by at least ten times, reduce the massive amounts of grammar errors that you are seeing here and is much less taxing on the brain