The Progressive Blog Alliance HQ

All right. Sorry for taking this long. My job is really giving me a stressful time right now, so I can dedicate less time than I would like to this site.

Now, there are several problems:

• Spam comments were submitted like no tomorrow.
• Worse, spam nodes were being submitted like no tomorrow.
• People are still not on the blogroll.
• The captcha apparently doesn't work, in that it doesn't keep spam out but has been known to keep out legitimate users.
• The site allows unfiltered HTML posts, which is practically an invitation to hackers.

I have been approaching all of these issues in turn...

Spam

I have installed the Akismet module. It apparently outsources spam filtering to an external service - which I normally wouldn't be thrilled with but I have seen what Gmail can do (better than any individual filter), and I'm desperate.

The recent deluge of "trickspam" - nodes that looked like they were legitimate articles, but were likely copied off some newsfeed and then spiked with pornographic links - has been utterly quelched, and the accounts involved (bigroom, yuyuyu, lingling, jeek) are blocked.

The latest comment spam has also been purged, and we are now once again clean.

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Blogroll

I have installed a home-made blogroll module I wrote yesterday evening. It is based on an earlier work I made a year ago (which didn't work very well and was designed against version 4.7).

It works like this:

1. You edit your account, and under "Blog Profile" put in your site information.
2. Check the box that says "I would like to be added to the PBA Blogroll"
3. Wait till an admin has next time to go through the Approval queue.

At the moment, there is nothing fancy regarding the way the blogs are listed: I simply dump the whole lot on the page. Features will eventually include a grouping by taxonomy/location, ordering by activity or recent posts, randomized selection of links and so forth.

Since the blogrolll module is run by pbahq.org, not blogrolling.com, you will need to use a different Javascript invocation to syndicate it. Find it at the blogroll help page.

BBCode

Instead of HTML, posts will now need to be formatted with BBCode. If you've ever been a member of a discussion forum, you know how this works. If not, quick introduction (there's also a nice summary available for BBCode at Wikipedia):

BBCode tags use [square] brackets instead of HTML's brackets. Links are made with , images with .

You can see the supported tags in the "Input Format" list just below the text area of the post. To find out more about what they do, click the link below said list.

Call for help

I'm really busy with my job, and two of the problems I have solved just now will continue to generate routine tasks:

• Firstly, spam patrol: Comments and nodes should be regularly checked through and marked as spam if necessary.
• Secondly, blogroll patrol: Someone needs to regularly go through the list of yet unlisted blogs and approve them for listing in the blogroll.

If you've been here a while and would like to help out, drop me a private message and you will be put on the maintenance team for these two things.

So in summary, we may still be half-dead and painfully lethargic, but our blogroll will soon stop being the butt of jokes and the spam has been cleaned up for now! :-)