WordPress MU

sometimes I wonder about certain splogs/blogs, are they spam? Or is it just some strange psycho blogging?

what do you reckon this is? http://polish.zice.ro/

I can't find no links so its not about spreading links or linkfarming, the email address of the guy looks legitimate so I am not sure whatsitall about !?

what other criterias do you use to determine if you found a "strange blog" or a splog?

Spammer. Note that one sentence doesn't reflect on the next one. It's all nonsense.

I usually just leave them until they start throwing in the links and then nuke them just to be on the same side.

You could probably copy and paste the content into Google to find it elsewhere. Call it non-original content and nuke for that if you want.

i delete like 4 or 5 fo these a week. its sad, i wish real bloggers were as likely to go thru the setup process. if its not clothing, its dieting. they all have gmail account, which i really cant ban.

ugh. anyone else?

With me, it's Yahoo and I don't think we've had one true signup with Yahoo. I'm debating on it, especially knowing Yahoo Hosting's policy on having no issue with hosting spammers.

"they all have gmail account, which i really cant ban"

But, you can report to Google, if you want.

My biggest problem lately hasn't been splogging signups, it's been them swiping my rss feed and republishing it for their own google ad exposure. Which, if anyone is going to make a penny off my content, its me. Not to mention violating copyright laws, etc.

My answer to this initially was to just add on my copyright statement to feed items, after the post.

While that did deter a few people, it didn't deter them all.

So, I switched it up. Created 10 different versions of my copyright notice, moving and altering slightly just to throw off a filter, plus I intermingle an "authentication code" that changes with each build, as well as it's location.

Then, I stuck this before the rss post content, AND description.

Not much effect on legitimate readers, but it sure does kill the content lifters out there.

But, you can report to Google, if you want.

Yeah, like that'll do a whole lot of good. Maybe they'll do something about blogger and blogspot at the same time. *snort*

Never said it would do any good. Just said it was an option.

@lunabyte

regarding your issue with "stolen" feeds, I remember having played around with a plugin called antileech for simple wordpress, which was quite good. If I remember right you could watch user-agents that fetched your feed and then decide to which one to present another content you can choose :-) maybe that helps you - dunno if it can be made to work with wpmu just a thought...

wow. 31 minutes later and blog suspended. lol.

Nice Ov, I hadn't really thought to look.

The only downside to that might be if a user agent matches a spammer ( which they are, just using your content to boost their content and ad exposure ) and also matches a valid request ( like from my tag site, or one of the other sites I do allow to use my content ).

Might look at it though. If that's the case, I have just the places to redirect them too... and they are definitely not work safe. he he he

what about this one? http://nogaslonia.zice.ro/

I don't understand a word so I can't judge it... tested some of the links and some go to something looking like a catalogue or a linkfarm, others to stuff I just don't get...

another one:

http://crydiary.zice.ro/ this time a chinese one - can't understand a word...mail address is @ yahoo...

Hey Ov,

Couple things unrelated to spammers... I hit the page (I was curious what a Chinese Splog looks like) and I noticed that you don't have short stat setup correctly (I'm seeing DB errors) and also you have show_errors on in your PHP setting. This might not be a good idea since it can leads to potential security issues.

Good luck.

thx for the hints, regarding show errors, I googled around and found you were referring to a wpmu setting:

var $show_errors = false;

which I now have set to false.

Regarding wp-shortstat you're right. you will see errors if that blogs wp-shortstat page wasn't visited at least once... I know drmike posted the code somewhere to get rid of this, I just did not have the time to fix it.

Ovidiu, Oh, sorry if I wasn't more clear in my post, I was actually referring to PHP show errors. I didn't realize that wordpressmu had such a feature.

Anyway if you want to tell PHP to not show errors (a good idea on a production server) you should change the following value in your php.ini... "display_errors = Off"

You can still get errors reported in your log files by setting "log_errors = On".

Good luck.

Chinese by the way can be translated with babelfish. Big help. :)