Category: Computing

Posts about computing and computing related matters

Forum Revamp

In the background I’ve been working on a complete overhaul of the Camsigh Forums.

I put the site up in January 2004 and I’ve bolted a few things on since then, but it was all getting very messy and tired so I’ve been building up a new version in my spare time.

Hopefully over the weekend I’ll get round to cutting the data over (not as easy as it sounds as there is some crud lying round in the existing database), and then users will have a nice new looking forum with some new features (like being able to post pictures directly into posts)

Google Ads

Well I’m quite pleased with myself. The mod to support google ads in the phpbb forums only handles text ads. I wanted to put in some of the referrer ads so I wrote a little bit of php code which sets up an array with the different ads in and then picks one at Random.

I also dropped the code to put random Google “Pack” adverts into this blog mod which works quite well 😉

Phew!

Well the e-commerce site is up and running at www.ladykat.co.uk

I’ve been working on a rather large silly project to “recover” some old phpbb forum posts from html file dumps. It was hard work but fun.. the fruits of that effort can be found at www.tty.homelinux.org/board

I’m also working on a two stack parser in PHP – so far I’ve got all the logic worked out and I’ve written the extression parser which breaks the inputted line into chunks. Not sure when its going to go live but when it does pubnight ( www.pubnight.org.uk ) is going to get a lot more dynamic content.

Off doing other things

Well I’ve been busy. I’ve been building an e-commerce website for my wife which has been taking up quite a bit of my time. I’ve also been working on a Wiki, including writing some really complex wiki extensions and I’m now working on a simple Database extension which will allow wiki users to create simple database tables within wiki pages and then query them

So far so good

Well my scripts automatically add the IP address to the .htaccess file if it works out they are spamming.

Blocking a couple of domains in URLS got rid of a lot of crap. Block jo.pl and it will take out a lot of your spam as thats all they seem to host!

All quiet on the Western Front – again

Well the RBLs have trapped a lot of the spammers. Also I’ve put a bit of code in that at the moment is logging the IP of any person accessing the trackback script.

The next step is to take that code and wrap it into the trackback script so that posts containing “banned” words get their IP added to the blocking list.

Well the code is now modified. All trackback posts record the IP of the poster. If the IP of the trackback is in a linked table then the trackback isn’t displayed. This allows me to quickly “block” posts by inserting one IP but leaves the trackback hidden so I can work on it.

Also if I get the same IP posting to the same entry more than once it assumes that it is spam, accepts it (in case it isnt!) and drops the IP address into my spammers table.

Gone away!!

Well after following the instructions here http://www.gotroot.com/tiki-view_blog_post.php?blogId=2&postId=34

I’ve managed to get it so that spammers on my boards get a 403 message.

The only thing I found was that the directives had to go into the apache2 config file rather than the .htaccess file which complained “order not allowed here”. I also adjusted it so that only POST is blocked..

I’m going to run with it for a few days then I’m going to add a couple more RBLs to the list and then I can hopefully put the trackback link back in.

And for those who dont want to down load the whole of the apache source files just to compile this one little bit here is the recompiled mod_access for Apache 2.0.48

http://www.tty.homelinux.org/board/mod_access.zip

Hackers, crackers and other annoyances

My server was getting swamped the other day, checking into it I found that it was links from LiveJournal to a pic in my photo albums which someone had used to illustrate a tack poem. Livejournal users had then copied this poem round each other, and republished it – and every view was leeching the pic off my server.

Now I guess its a compliment that they liked my squirrel pic but it was used without permission and with no credit.

So I stopped it.. specifically that image cannot be accessed when the referrer URL is livejournal.

So then I started looking round and found lots of attempts to hijack awstats for hacking other servers. So I’ve put in a redirect based on IP to stop this happening.

I also tightened up my SSH logins – and record unauthorised accesses onto that (which populates the website black list).

Today I had some scum from Israel (specifically a user of Barak I.T.C) use a java application to post Viagra spam on my forum. So if you were on 85.65.58.1 a few minutes ago – I saw you, deleted your post and blocked your IP.

Its sad that the internet is now full of people who try to break into, hijack or otherwise misuse other peoples resources.

Still thats the way of the world I suppose.

Oddly enough its THIS blog entry that the spamming scum keep picking on. I wonder why.