The site is now running on the new framework, and you'll notice a little something below. Like I said before, this is something I'll be testing for a while, and it will have varying content. I plan on trying out some very broad categories, so you may see some kinda awkward stuff from time to time. For now though, this is it, folks!

I think I got all the bugs worked out with migrating to the new framework, but if you spot any problems please let me know.

kthxbai

Oh, also, I'm porting the site to my newer framework. The benefits of the new framework are many, but the two biggest ones a.) it uses less resources at runtime, and b.) it's much easier for me to maintain and enhance. As I may have mentioned before, I should be releasing the framework sometime in the nearish future. In the meantime, please watch your step. I may leave some Smarty code laying around, and it's a mess to trip over.

I am going to be running a bit of an experiment, starting sometime this week. The result of this will probably cause some more ads to show up on the site. I am going to try several different categories, just to test the waters. If you see these and have any feedback on them, please let me know.

The Google ads from last month were very irrelevant and received only 2 clicks. I've changed the ad style now, so we'll have to see what happens. :)

As you will see to the left, I have added a Google ad to the site. I plan to run this for no longer than 2 months as a test. Once that period is over, I plan to test other ad formats to see what sort of results I can produce.

So, here are the changes I was talking about.

There's still a lot of work to be done, so be patient. You can still post comments though. If you want to add an entry, login, or sign up, too bad; none of that is done yet. If I get out of bed at a decent time in the morning, I'll rip through all of that. I'm going to cook up the RSS feed tonight, then hit the sack.

Enjoy.

I was just playing around in Photoshop and whipped this up. What do you think?

I've added some filters to automatically blacklist bots based on submitted content. The bulk of the recent additions are from *.ca.cx, and it's been stupid having to manually blacklist each one, knowing exactly what they were. I've also set it up to blacklist certain pornographic sites. We'll have to wait and see how this works. :)

I mentioned in my previous post that I had taken it upon myself to notify the appropriate individuals of the spam being hosted on their networks. I am proud to say that 3 of the approximately 7 domains that were notified have responded. The responses varied from "It's already been taken care of." to "We think it's taken care of, but please provide us with your logs."

As such, this project is going to gain new priority and it's own subdomain. I should be able to get everything in place over the next couple of weeks, and by then I hope to have the public "API" in place, so you can help track spammers.

I'll keep everyone updated as progress is made. :)

I blacklisted about 300 IP addresses in the last 4 days, which is good. The new version of the Spam Project database will actually log a lot of information about the spammer, including whatever content they've submitted. It's nice to get a bit of information to make filtering a bit easier.

Oddly enough, the content is originating from Asian-based communities, including groups of Asian students studying here in the US. I'm not saying that all Asian students are doing this, but the majority of the content is coming from these groups.

I've taken the liberty of compiling an e-mail to the public contact at these universities, informing them that such content is being hosted on their servers, and that there is a definite issue with them. Hopefully it'll get something done to bring this down a notch.

The remainder of the hits are coming from random unpatched forums or web proxies, so it's going to be hard to notify anyone.