Waffle

Re-interpretations of Scott McCloud's comic for Google. See also the Related Stories at the bottom of the page: the Register is pretty critical of Google Chrome, devoting several articles to its faults already.

AdBlock Plus had been spectacularly ineffective at blocking a browser-hijacking ad that showed up each time I browsed the Webcomic List forums, but someone responding to the thread I used to complain about it provided me with some heavier artillery: a gigantic list of malicious sites to add to your host file and a page containing an explanation of why it works and instructions for adding the list. I'd been vaguely aware of this possibility, but hadn't been motivated to give it a try. The instructions on the site are very much geared towards Windows user, but Mac OS X and Linux users can just edit their hosts file in a text editor. The linux hosts file is usually in /etc - you need the one that simply says 'hosts', not 'hosts.deny' or 'hosts.allow'. The poster said OS X users can find it in /private/etc — I haven't checked.

Two comments:
One, normally when I edit config files I use 'sudo pico [file]' and enter my password. That doesn't quite work because pico, a lightweight command-line editor, doesn't like it when you try to paste in long bits of text. So I used 'sudo kate /etc/hosts' instead.
Two, the list, while awe-inspiring in its comprehensiveness, is perhaps a bit too thorough. I actually rather like advertising as a source of income for sites that provide content or services, so I want to allow ad servers that I think are well-behaved. I have that problem with the preset blacklists in AdBlock Plus as well. I want to allow, at a minimum, Google adsense and Project Wonderful, because I use them on my own sites. The malicious hosts list provided by msvp.com blocks several Google ad servers; one AdBlock subscription list blocks both, which is why at home I use AdBlock without any pre-configured list. I'm in no position to tell you to allow these sites as I have a vested interest in people allowing them, but I would encourage you not to use block lists indiscriminately as your own criteria may be different from those of the people making the lists, or the information may be out of date.

Jeroen asked about Joomla the other day while working on a project. So when I found this old article on Pete Ashton's blog while looking for something else, I thought of him. Take it from a guy I trust to know his stuff: Joomla sucks donkey cock.

Now, having had to use it on a daily-ish basis for a while I can honestly say, hand on heart, that it's a piece of shit and a hinderance to my work. At least the interface is. It's the most unintuitive, frustrating thing I've had to click my mouse on since I can't remember when. This is not helped by the project I'm using Joomla for not needing a fraction of its power.

So, my advice if you're setting up a site and want a content management system? Think very hard about what you need, strip away what you don't need and use either WordPress or Movable Type. They might be sold as blogging CMSs but they can do much more and they won't make you want to eat your fist.

I haven't used Joomla myself, but I'm happy to take Pete's word for it. I complain about Movable Type a lot, but it does what I want it to... eventually.

I'd never heard of Silverstripe before, but it's probably worth a spin in case I ever need to get a (non-blog) website off the ground quickly.

Thanks to studio-mate Jeroen, I'm back in the market for web development work. It's been a long time since I've done web development for anything other than my own sites, though, so I'm reading up and looking for some experience-builders. Simple things to do so I can say I've done them and know how to do it, and get a feel for the snags. So if anyone reading this needs, say, WordPress installed on a clean system, or some WordPress templates made, you just might be able to talk me into doing it for free if it's not a big job. I do hope to get past that stage soon, though.

While doing some background research on my Eurosong Drunk-But-Not-Quite-LiveBlogging report, I found a Corante post entitled Six Apart Spins Like a Whirling Dervish in which tech blogger Strange Attractor picks apart a Six Apart press release:

Most commercial installations don't have big server farms, nor do they have lots of technical staff. Yet even if you do chuck a few extra blades and a couple of developers at the problem, it's still difficult to make MT work in either mode, static or dynamic, if you're being hammered by spammers. Again, writing popular posts isn't the problem. Serving pages isn't the problem. Comments are the problem.
Now, it's very easy to blame the spammers, but the sad fact is that spammers aren't going to go away, and tools have to be built to withstand their onslaughts. MT isn't. It didn't matter how many servers you threw at MT 3.2x, comment spam could still kill them.

Oh, and just to nitpick... all that lovely open source stuff from LiveJournal? Well, let's remember that minor point of fact that 6A bought LJ for its open source goodies. No sneakily trying to claim credit for LJ, please.

You might've seen this effect already — ever check out a link that's been promoted on a big site like Digg or Slashdot and been faced with a "database connection error" when you visit the blog that got Dugg? Well, Movable Type is designed to prevent you from ever having to face that problem.

I feel like a broken record. Spam, guys, spam. Not the Slashdot Effect. (For the record, I've noticed that the Slashdot Effect is nowhere near as strong as it used to be anyway.)

Word. Rebuilds of comment spams that pass the filters take forever and sometimes fail, leaving the spam in the published posts. Regular expression filters don't work. Spam has hosed a previous installation of this blog so severely that it took down all of Xepher.net with it, causing Xepher to add resource limits to all processes. When I upgraded, every single rebuild hit those limits, until we switched the blog over to another database (to be fair, that move from ancient BerkeleyDB to SQLite was long overdue anyway). Since then, Movable Type has caused ROCR.net to go down at least once as a result of hitting the resource limits under an avalanche of trackback spam (this time, thanks to said limits, the rest of the server was spared). Since I had already stopped allowing trackbacks on the blog, I have been able to prevent a reoccurrence by chmodding mt-tb.cgi to 000 - I recommend that MT users do that to every script they don't use, so if you get your comments from Haloscan, nix your mt-comments.cgi.

Movable Type offers lots of neat functionality, particularly including easy multi-blogging, but the product's appeal has definitely faded for me. Moving to another system would require importing blog entries so that their URLs don't change, setting up multi-blogging and introducing five other people to a new blogging interface, none of which sound like fun ways to spend my time. But the next time I feel the urge to upgrade, I will probably suck it up and move to WordPress.

First, a question I've been meaning to ask: does anyone reading this know of a web bbs that
1) runs on PHPBB; and
2) has some version of Bad Behavior, such as this mod as its only defense against spam? In other words, no CAPCHAs, no other mods or plugins aimed at preventing the board from being overrun with spam?

If so, I very much want to hear from it. Bad Behaviour has done really well at stopping the endless flood of spam on Talk About Comics that I've been wondering if the time has come to stop making new members jump through hoops to get activated, or even open the forum to guest posters again. You know, make it a more inviting place. I'm not the guy who gets to decide this, by the way, but if there's evidence that Bad Behavior can do the job on its own, I can put in a word. Let me know in email or comments under this post.

I was prompted to bring this up by reading Matt Skala's recent post Why Web BBSes Suck. It's a great post that really opened my eyes to the extent to which I was taking bad functionality for granted for no other reason than that they've always been designed that way. I could quibble about some things, but I think the general thrust of his argument, that Web BBSes have terrible usability and don't serve the needs of their users well, is correct.

There is good news on some issues. Project Wonderful Talk, whose CAPTCHA I've finally been able to defeat, allows the use of Livejournal accounts for identification, which I hope many more boards will adopt (as well as other, similar, multi-site identification methods); PHPBB isn't as ubiquitous as it was a year ago even if it's still very dominant, and BBcode is more standardised than Matt claims it is. I also think the dominance of PHPBB could end very quickly if something truly better came along. Five years ago, when Ultimate Bulletin Board was as ubiquitous as PHPBB is now, it was quickly superceded by PHPBB because PHPBB was less crash-prone and easier to set up. The spambots have since made PHPBB at least as big a nightmare to work with as UBB was then.

So what I'd like to see is a project in which skilled designers and coders who have read Matt's rant build a new Web BBS from the ground up so it has the features the users actually need instead of the ones that Ultimate Bulletin Board happened to have in 1998 and which all other Web BBS systems have copied. And integrated spambot protection that actually works. Those two ingredients together would, I think, make most forum owners drop PHPBB like a hot potato.

Kristofer Straub reports on the deletion of his webcomic Starslip Crisis:

Delete Wikipedia: A Webcomics Case Study:

The Webcomics Purge of ‘07 continues with the deletion of Starslip Crisis‘ article. An article for deletion was submitted to Wikipedia, to delete Starslip Crisis, and the measure carried.

The result was delete and redirect to Blank Label Comics. — Nearly Headless Nick {C} 10:42, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I started the vote to delete Starslip Crisis.

I started the vote to delete Starslip Crisis using a freshly-registered user with no other edits under his belt.

I also used faulty logic to initiate the discussion: I said www.starslip.com has no Alexa data, and isn’t notable as a result. (www.starslip.com is just a redirect: the comic’s URL is www.starslipcrisis.com and has an Alexa rank.)

Then I registered ten more fake users to stuff the original delete vote. This is called “sock puppetry” in Wikipedia terminology, and is frowned upon. The names of the fake users I used in the AfD are: Salby, Incredulous, Banalzebub, Hammerabbi, LKeith30, Repromancer, Expiwikist, Floxman, YothSog, and 66.27.212.63.

It’s so frowned upon that when someone else — a person I don’t know calling himself WizardBrad — tried to use a sock puppet to get his Keep vote to count twice, he was found to be cheating and his vote was struck from the record! Bless your heart, WizardBrad.

Here I was terrified that the Wikipedia editors-that-be would uncover my ruse to falsely delete a webcomic from their pages, and not only did they not find me out, they discounted someone cheating in Starslip’s favor!! How did they catch him and not me? Why did they bother to check up on his IP and not the IP address I used for the ten fake voters?

Oh, I will admit, I was sly. My fake voters engaged in conversation with one another, even one convincing another that the article should be deleted, not just merged under something else. Wikipedia cautions its editors that sock puppets can appear, and that the “straw man sock puppets”

are created by users with one point of view, but act as though they have an opposing point of view, in order to make that point of view look bad, or to act as an online agent provocateur.

What I tried to do was take the popular point of view among Wikipedia’s editors — “delete webcomics” — and then prove that it would be accepted even under fallacious/suspicious circumstances. And it looks like I was successful.

Starslip Crisis is gone from Wikipedia for made-up reasons championed by my team of ten grudge-carrying fakes.

As it turns out, it’s not hard to get something deleted from Wikipedia, especially if it’s on some ice-blasted, barren frontier land on the internet like webcomics, where no one really knows what’s important and what isn’t, and no one really cares to make sure.

Yes, it does look to me like the process is broken, why do you ask?

The CAPTCHA system at Project Wonderful Talk is so good it blocked me from signing up twelve times in a row. I don't know why this is. The blurb next to the CAPTCHA claims that it is case-sensitive, but I've only seen capital letters in there. Also, it instructs people to enter only bold text, but in some cases it's hard to tell the difference. Whatever the cause is, I'm sure I'm not the only person who's been blocked from taking part in this forum. Not that the people at Projectwonderfultalk.com will be able to tell, because if there is a contact email address anywhere on the site, it's been hidden with great efficiency. Avoid this website if you value your time.
Update: Contact information was hidden at the bottom of one of its blog posts. I would like to point out that humans look for email addresses in the same way that bots do, by scanning for strings that look like Address@host.tld. Or a "Contact" button above the fold, if you find that having to filter out spam is too high a price to pay for being reachable.

Even the most basic alternative to CAPTCHAs, a link for the visually handicapped to follow, is missing. You want to sign up or post on Projectwonderfultalk? Prayer is your only option.

CAPTCHAs are effective at blocking spam bots, but at a great cost to legitimate users. I really should point out that on the Talk About Comics forums, spam bots stopped being a problem as soon as Joey installed the PHPBB plugin for Bad Behavior on the forums. This has also blocked a number of legitimate users, but that number has been very small, and it's been more effective than the CAPTCHA system that was already in place. The CAPTCHA there is still in place for new signups, as far as I know, but for all I know, it's become unnecessary.

(Summary: If your Reiser file system is corrupt, a Knoppix CD is more useful for rescuing it than a (K)Ubuntu CD. If you're not either me six months from now or someone with a badly messed up hard drive with a Reiser file system, you probably won't find the rest of the post at all interesting.)

(more...)

I've been using Project Wonderful for a few weeks now, both as an advertiser and a website publisher hosting the ads. My own advertising sales aren't too great, so far; all my slots have some spaces left that are going for $0, and my total earnings are less than a dollar a day. But I've seen a few places where bids have been going way up so it's quite possible to get some money out of this ad system. While I'm waiting for that to happen to me, I'm putting up many little ads in the $0 to $0.10 range myself.
I do this largely because I can. The interface is very straight-forward and invites advertisers go gamble away small amounts of money. But there is one thing wrong with it that breaks Project Wonderful for me, which is that the server sends far too many messages. Dozens a day, telling me in cheery tones that my $0 bid on some tiny little site has been approved, is the high bidder, has been outbid or has been canceled with no reason given*). If, like me, you take the bottom feeder strategy of taking out many low bids on many different sites, you'll be flooded past the spam threshold, train yourself to delete automated messages unread, and then miss the personal message that another user has also sent through the system. This just happened to me and is the reason why I'm posting this now instead of incorporating this complaint in a longer review that I had been planning to post on one of the other comics blogs. But even before that, the flood was a nuisance: the many low bids that I make simply aren't worth the time spent reading those messages about them. Project Wonderful needs a digest option.
[Update]: Hidden in the profile configuration page for PW is a link to a page where you can change your contact preferences. That should take care of the worst of the flood.

*) This is the result of another flaw in the PW design, which is that ad blocks can't be shrunk or expanded while there are still active bids on a block. I guess it would be rude to kick off one advertiser to shrink the ad block by one button space. But publishers will want to tinker with the size anyway, so now if they want to do that, they have no option but to kick every bidder off and start anew.