So lately I’ve gotten about 100 spam comments for the “texas holdem” idiot. Fortunately, not a single one has actually been posted, because of the whitelisting method I’ve implemented.

The annoying thing is, the posts still sit in my moderation queue and I get emailed about it. So today, I took another step. I hacked up the wordpress code that checks against the list of words that immediately flag a comment for moderation. Now instead of using it to moderate comments, I’m just killing them outright if they match. My other plugins do enough to stop spam, so I can afford this.

I got to thinking more about it, and thought to see how high the guy had gotten his page into Google. He’d loaded up the front page for searches on “texas-holdem” and had some for “texas holdem”. Now until this point, as bloggers our spam fighting has been almost entirely passive. We limit or can the spam. I say, it’s time to fight back. So here’s my idea. We pull down the master blacklist from the MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse, and then pull updates via the RSS 2.0 feed. Then we all make pages that link their spam domains to a page explaining what comment spamming is. Let’s outrank the spammers using similiar tactics.

I’m no expert in Google bombing, so this might never work. But, wouldn’t it be neat if it did? It would be harder to get the cooperation of enough sites than get the code working.

I picked up an announcement this morning from the openpodcast.org feed that iPodder 1.1 is available. Unfortunately, I can’t find any info on the site announcement about what has changed. So, I’ll resort to eyeballing what is new.

As far as I can tell, here are the new features:

• You can check specific feeds via a button click, rather than just hitting every feed
• It can select feeds via a podcast directories. iPodder.org is in the list.
• You can now select which directory to save enclosed files to. I think this means, in iTunes if you set iPodder to save under the iTunes directory, iTunes will delete the files on removal from the library. With 1.0, you have to set iTunes to copy imported files into the iTunes folder, and then delete the iPodder downloads.
• There is an option to run a command on a file after each download. I am keeping my fingers crossed that this command is run before importing into your media player. This will allow users to add mp3 tags (i.e. reset the genre or comment to “Podcast”) in order to make organizing podcasts easier.

For those unfamiliar with podcasting, please see the wikipedia entry.

North Carolina Man Gets 9 years in jail for spam.

I added a new album to the gallery of our pumpkins from this year.