I host a lot of wordpress sites for friends, family and business and one thing I’ve noticed is the collection of spam on some of these sites because they either don’t want to use the provided spam plugins, don’t maintain the plugins or just simply don’t care about their blog anymore.
Something I do regularly on my site but neglected to run on the other sites is running a SQL to delete the comments marked as spam in the comments table.
Instructions:
Open up PHPMyAdmin. After selecting your DB on the left click “SQL”,
The SQL to enter should be,
DELETE FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_approved` = ’spam’
If you’re like me I and changed the default table prefix (highlighted above) from wp_ just change the SQL with the correct prefix for your table.
Then click “GO”.
After you’ll be greeted with this informational dialog. 43K comments is ridiculous and will slow down your db.
You’re not done yet, click structure and optimize your tables to get rid of the overhead.
I’d recommend reading this illogical post from Duncan at Techcrunch and then rally around Matt in the comments section.
After reading all of Duncan’s and Matt’s comments I had to throw my two-cents in,
Duncan: I don’t see your point. You mention that Matt can’t have it both ways but by writing this article and placing *your* issues into a “gray area” you’re rewarding your terms with two-ways to lean; neither for or against, making you’re actually opinion irrelevant. And isn’t this just an opinion piece? I don’t see any facts–that are correct–, it’s all lambasting for self-promotion, similar to your friends at Vallywag.
No matter how many times you’ll be told that your statements are false and irrational you’ll always be clinging to that “gray area” message.
In your response to the question you pose to Matt, “WTF did someone do to you BTW? Where did this hatred come from?”. What exactly made you criticize Matt–and by association the entire wordpress community of developers and supporters–? All without one ounce of research of how to properly run a business through OSS, the business model of automattic and how Matt runs it, the history of wordpress or even get to know how spam works? Instead of reporting you glued your self-important thoughts together and lambasted the very person AND the community that built the infrastructure for you to get paid from.
I find this post so disturbing as D’s trying to associate taking advantage users by placing paid text ads on released code is the same as Matt providing a service through Wordpress.com and Akismet. He really needs to step back and learn a few things, specifically:
The Blogroll: it’s there as an example for users, is easily managable and provides a credit to the hard 
working developer community. Since Matt works very hard at wordpress.org he deserves it like the others. Lastly how does he make money off of those links again?
Akismet: Is entirely a service. Yes the free Akismet users contribute to the whole but they also benefit is the entire community. Matt is not holding back the perfect solution to stop all spam for every wordpress user, he’s just providing an added value to the paid users of Akismet because it includes a service level that the free addition could not support.
Wordpress.com: Charging for an extra service level through Wordpress.com doesn’t leverage the community nor the code-base. It’s a service level agreement that you’re paying for, similar to Akismet.
Update: Another comment.
I’ve been steadily moving towards this already but here are my blog goals:
“Actual Friends”
Pownce
General
I guess my overall goal is to post more and figure out something for my VTA family and friends because I know dancameron.org is boring my wife.
I do apaligize for the duplicates yesterday. After migrating to Pownce and shutting off twitter tools to pull in posts Twitter Tools went crazy. Every time I deleted the twitter posts they automatically were added minutes later without my doing. I’m thinking it was a cron issue because only after I deleted the cron value from the options table did it stop, but I did delete the plugin instead of just deactivating it and also deleted the tweets table so I don’t know.
Anyways for the people who do not prefer my mini posts (now from Pownce) I do have other feeds for you to use, depending on the category:
http://dancameron.org/category
http://dancameron.org/category
In my next theme I’m going to make these more clear for readers because this morning I received a concerned e-mail,
I’m interested in what you write from a web design point of view and would certainly resubscribe if you create a feed for entries only
Since I’m talking about Pownce as my mini-blog tool; I really don’t know how I’m going to manage it in the future. I do want the posts in my feed and I do want everyone to be able to comment, not just Pownce users. So for now I’m going to keep them the way they are. Currently they’re being pulled in by feedwordpress and then a post is created. This is actually the same way I used twitter tools with the only caveat that my site’s sidebar will now link directly to Pownce. My reasoning is my “fans” will read my RSS and will be able to get to the post on my site to comment, my guests on the other hand will just go to Pownce directly if they click a link in the sidebar and hopefully they’ll just followup at Pownce.
In the future I do want to seperate the two becuase I really want the ability to segmant out my actual friends so I can post whatever I want and send whatever I want without any questioning about it being appropriate. And Pownce does that for me. An easier transition would be for them to fix their damn commenting if you’re not logged-in/registered.
I mentioned a new theme and I want to say that I’ve been inspired by simplicity of some major blogger sites, namely Dave Winer’s site. The plan is to either get going on a new theme for the sandbox competition or wait until the entries are released so I can fork one of the entries. The later seems more reasonible at the moment however I don’t know what I’ll be doing on some Friday night at midnight in the coming weeks.
Received a Pownce invite from Techcrunch’s newly purchased inviteshare.com. I’d like to say that inviteshare is not just a great idea but the design and implementation is wonderful. I received my invite to Pownce in less than 5 minutes of requesting it; I just hope the demonoid invite get fulfilled through it’s small community.
On to my early impressions of Pownce:
It’s been compared to Twitter but it’s completely missing the mobility of Twitter and the accessibility of Twitter. Without an API it’s going to be very hard to get updates of what’s going on over there and actually updating your friends requires you to login to the site or use the AIR application they’ve released.
That AIR application is rather bulky. Not in application size or overhead, I’m actually sure it’s very light using the Adobe framework but the design of the app is too simple. You can’t change the style, transparency or size and I do not need anything else on my desktop. That’s what I love about Twitter because I already have IM open and getting updates through IMs and sending messages through IM fits perfectly into my mobility. Pownce is lacking in this area to the tune of null.
The feature set is everything that I’d ever want in a mini/social-blog. You can send files, separate links out, post files or events and it’s not just posting it’s all about sending. You can easily segment out your friends and send only to them or just individually. I actually love this because it’s completely personal and it makes sense and very similar to facebook.
facebook allows you to be completely private and pownce walks the line. I really enjoy how there are fans and friends but I wish I could ask to be a fan or make a freind a fan instead. A few of my “friends” aren’t actual friends but I don’t want to remove them. I love the personalization of pownce. Not for interface personalization because there isn’t any but the personalization and segmentation you give to your friends and fans is perfect.
I do see pownce replacing Twitter (for me) on shear feature set, unless Twitter kicks it up a notch but it’s going to take me a long time without being free’d up a little. Since I really don’t want to loose my twitter blog on this site I don’t know what to do, especially since it pownce does replace Twitter here it could handle all the comments. So unless I think of another way to merge the two services (maybe RSS splicing and an RSS module in the sidebar replacing the tweets to the right) it will take a while.
As you can tell I really like pownce and I’ll wait for it to replace anything but I will still use the service and hopefully you’ll join me.
I’m purging my online identity to just a few locations that I actually use since it was getting out of control. The major account escape that led to the purge was myspace, as you might have noticed if I’m a friend of yours. The others include:
On the chopping block
The ones I’ll keep:
There are more but as you can tell there are way to many listed already.
I’ve used a couple managed voicemail providers in the last few months. My first provider was callwave which sent me my voicemails as MP3 through email and just like any voicemail added the ability to call in and hear the voicemail from your phone in a queue. A month or two ago I started using Spinvox after a hearing it briefly on a forgotten tech podcast. It provides voicemail like any other service with a call in queue but where callwave sends you an audio file through email it converts the voicemail to text and emails me. The result is something really cool.
As a BlackBerry user Spinvox provides my voicemail to my phone immediately as text, allowing me to actually respond to any message much faster in a medium I prefer. Even though I love mobile phones I don’t love them to talk or call my voicemail I love them for the the other connections they provide, ie e-mail, text and internet.
Personally I hate voicemail, it’s awfully time consuming. It’s slow, you have to find the time to call in, listen to the voicemail and then you have to call the person for a reply. The message that I receive now is a very good conversion of the audio left in the queue sent through email that I can read whenever I want, in a setting that I want and I could forward it to the caller with a reply.
No matter who it is I just may not be in the setting where it’s appropriate to pick the phone up; I’d say 95% all my voicemails are the result of me not being able to pick the phone up or I simply don’t want to. Now I wait 2-3 minutes for the email to be sent, I read it either on my computer or the phone and I can call them back when I can without calling my voicemail first. The majority of the time it’s just to get an answer to a question so I just text or email them back with a response. It’s extremely productive for me and it helps me not do something I don’t like, being on the phone.
If anyone want’s a Spinvox account contact me. I’m going to e-mail the contact I know over at Spinvox later this week to sign-up a few friends and he’s told me that I can pass along a full list of people to get free 1-year accounts.
If there are any drawbacks to Spinvox it would be:
I missed my blogoversary on Sunday, thanks to my live archives for reminding me. 3 years earlier on that day I posted about “Best Buy not a Best Bet” with iBlog on Sara’s old mac laptop. It’s not a great post but it’s fun to look back and remember how that page looked so long ago in relation to this site. Best yet, it’s serves as an awesome reminder of Tim for me; telling me I needed a comment system on that old iBlog so he could coment on his experience, since that “friend” in the post was him.
A response to Alex calling me out.
Well, you forced me to defend myself.
My solution doesn’t have any single points of failure except maybe someone retrieving my password db from one of my local machines and then cracking it somewhere else, which you know is highly unlikely. More unlikely then someone getting to your “password pageâ€.
I refer to the “password page†from your previous post but I’m still unclear as how that page works. And I’m assuming that is the only way for you to get passwords from a new previously unused computers. Hmmm…hope you reset the browser cache.
So in defense I don’t have a “single point†of failure. Like everyone should I have all of my computers locked down with a system password and never stays unlocked while I’m away. I believe this is the single point of failure, if you’re worried about someone using an account of yours (locally) then you should be more worried about them getting into your apps, documents or stealing the damn computer and cracking somewhere else.
As for the trust Google thing. I have to; I use Gmail. They already know more about me then my mom or wife.
To detail what I do:
Multi-Tier
Modifiers
System password which is extremely hard to guess and locks down the computer on a 5 min. screensaver
Sync by GBS and a “Master passwordâ€And when I’m away from any of my systems I can easily remember my passwords. Something you can never do with a hash. And I’m more worried of someone getting my master list through keylogging, screenshots or other malicious ways then them using the same method to get into one of my tiers.
I’m ranting a little and if you don’t mind I’ll continue.
We live in a world that we need to be paranoid and aware. If you limit yourself to just making your passwords long and impossible to crack then you’re allowing someone to locally break into your machine or someone tampering with your or anyother machine with something that logs your keys and/or hashes.
There are a lot of points of failure in the processes we use but you cannot deny the more common singe point of failure is trusting an untrusted machine. Which reminds me of a friends insight.
If you have a Wii I want to be friend. You can either view my what little is shown at MiiPlaza.net or just add my wii code to your address book. Just make sure to tell me so I can add you.
Wii Code# 5194-0211-3676-0825
I’d also like to say Nintendo better fix this whole code thing and make up usernames for people. Because a 1216 digit code is horrible to have to remember and share with friends. Making it worse the Wii doesn’t even do friend confirmations. Both users have to add one another to the address book in order for it to work. What a hassle. On XBox live I had a gamertag and if I wanted to add a friend I’d just type their name in and they would get a message confirming the request and vise versa. It shouldn’t be that hard.
At least the wii does e-mailing, if you wanted to spend 10 minutes writing a short message to someone that could only reply to your wii address. Making e-mail worse if you actually had a real e-mail address like I’d expect from every wii owner.
