Well, I finally finished setting up the Blacklist for blog.evula.net. You can find all sorts of information about it here.
Hacked by ZeroI'm very excited about this. It kills roughly 95% of the spam that has been infecting these blogs. The best part is that all of you ("you" being blog.evula.net members) can contribute to the blacklist, and when one person adds a spam URL, it is applied to everyone.
For those using the software for the first time, you probably won't find much spam (if any). That's because when I first installed the program, I ran through everyone's blogs, deleting spam left and right and adding the new URLs to the Blacklist. One blog lost several hundred (at least 400) comments because it was hit so badly by spam.
To give you an idea of how effective this software it, is blocked roughly 100 comments in it's first 24 hours of operation. This weekend, it blocked 127 seperate attempts.
I installed an anti-spam plugin for MT to help protect the blogs against spammers... so far, I'm kicking spam's ass. It's great.
Actually, it will qualify for next week's Imperial update. I'm going to have everything worked out by then, and email all the users instructions on how to use the system, even though I'll be making my rounds around blog.evula.net to remove spam on my own.
...for trying to steal my battle.net account by switching my email into yours. It is fairly funny, though. :)
Sorry, but last week was a hellish week; bad days at work mean that I'm too damn tired to do anything when I get home. As a result, I've got nothing in the Empire that is getting updated today. I feel bad about that, but not too bad; I can't drive myself crazy, after all, since that would be even worse. :)
Honestly, the only reason for today's update is the fact that Alien vs. Predator came out Friday. Sure, I had someone else's Review sitting around too, but it's the AvP review that got me going. :)
Anyway, more stuff around the Empire next week. I'm so far off my schedule for things to do, but I'm still managing to do [I]something[/I] each week, so I'm happy no matter what.
And yes, I realize that I'm posting this on the 17th, not the 16th; I didn't feel like working on it immediatly when I came home. Sue me. :P
So I've got three new Reviews up; two by Flatty, one by me. The big news (if you want to call it that) about this is that there is now a Games section on the Reviews page. Right now, it's just got three there, but you can help to change that! Just write up a sensibly-sized (no "OMGLOGL IT SUX0RZ!" tripe, please) review of a game, and I'll post it when I can. :)
In other news, I'm going to try to do something about all the blog spam. Look for an Imperial Update in a couple of weeks involving the blogs.
Specifically, blog spam sucks.
I've found a couple of MT plugins that should help cut down on the amount of spam we blog.evula.net users get. I'm a little worried about how much work is going to be involved; technically, I've got over 70 (!) blogs on here, and if I have to install the plugins for each... ugh.
Hopefully I'll have the anti-spam stuff up in a couple of weeks, as one of the weekly Empire updates.