Wordpressmu

I Take Abuse According to RFC 2142

I was told Friday that Buzzword.Com has been added to a blacklist at RFC Ignorant because the domain doesn't have an abuse email account. Somebody wanted to report a spam blog on my server, and when he couldn't send mail to an abuse account here, I was turned in for RFC reeducation. RFC 2142 requires that web sites and other servers take mail at several standard mailboxes, including abuse@domain for complaints, postmaster@domain for issues regarding mail servers and webmaster@domain for web ... (read more)

2007/04/21

Finding Good Blogs in a Sea of Spam

The 16 free WordPress hosts I began in February have been a gigantic maintenance hassle because of spammer abuse, but they have lauched two cool new sites: The Ad Whisperers, a blog about TV commercials, and Political Fretwork, a liberal blog that mines the press for political news. Last night, Ad Whisperers linked to a phone commercial that has an unusual selling point -- our company will stick with you through all the changes in your life -- even sexual orientation: You may have seen the new ... (read more)

2007/04/20

XFN: Mark Up Your Friends

I added XFN support to Workbench this morning, putting keywords like "friend", "acquaintance", "met", and "colleague" inside the links on my blogroll. This tells XFN-aware software how I know people, which can be used to build distributed MySpace-style social networks across the web. I'm a generation too old for this kind of thing to seem normal, but I'm curious to see whether anyone's doing interesting stuff with this data. WordPress MU also supports XFN. Any time you add a link to your ... (read more)

2007/03/05

Defending WordPress MU from Splog Abuse

Over the weekend most of my new WordPress MU weblog servers were hit by splogs -- spam blogs created by bots and filled with links to commercial sites. I added a WordPress hacker's unofficial patch that requires users to fill out a captcha to create a new blog. The patch modifies wp-signup.php and adds a new file, wp-valid.php that generates the captcha graphic using code from the Quick Captcha PHP script. The first two active blogs to spring up on these servers are Political Fretwork and the ... (read more)

2007/02/21

Launching 16 Weblog Communities with WordPress MU

I installed 16 copies of WordPress MU, the multiuser version of WordPress, to begin free weblog hosting communities: Autobiography.Com, Buzzword.Com, Cowtown.Com, Dumb.Name, EatThePress.Com, Gaze.Com, GladYouAsked.Com, GodHatesBlogs.Com, KarmaWhore.Com, Pundit.Info, Sleigh.Com, Technique.Com, Weblog.Name, Weblog.Us, WorldWideWeblog.Com and Yuletide.Com. I enjoyed running Buzzword.Com when it hosted 3,000 free Manila weblogs from 2004-06, but Manila couldn't handle that many blogs on a single ... (read more)

2007/02/13