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...

• Drupal was updated to the current 5.x branch
• I re-installed the private messages module and tested it. We can now send PMs again.
• The error log table was corrupted; now that it's repaired, you won't be pelted with "watchdog.MYI can't be opened" errors whenever you post or log in.
• The captcha module has been updated and re-enabled. I hope it now works - I'll test it.
• The userpoints module has been reinstalled and points have been retroactively applied. If you wondered about the constant "Point total is now 10" messages on posting a new node, you'll soon notice that your points will actually increase now.

I'm in the process of updating the blog roll.

It's come to my attention that the Match Captcha is behaving oddly and preventing people from signing up or requesting new passwords. Many apologies for letting this remain unfixed so long.

I haven't had time to put this issue up at Drupal.org yet, but in the meantime I have disabled the module. Our first priority must be to be open for new members. Keeping out spambots is important in the long run, but until the module functions properly, I think we can cope.

Again, sorry for the inconvenience.

My work is still looming, but I have a few minutes to look around and see a few things that could be improved. For once, the primary links at the top could use a cleaning - two "help" items, they point to "?q=" even though we have clean URLs otherwise, and maybe "help" could have its own URL alias (/help).

Stuff like that.

I couldn't help but notice how many of you are still mucking about on blogspot.com domains. Don't get me wrong, blogspot is a great service -- its just that 95 percent of blogspot blogs are spam. As a result, you will never get the search engine traffic you deserve as long as you stay on blogspot. Don't be surprised to see 1000% increases in traffic as a result of not being a .blogspot.

Over the holidays, I'd love to help PBA members who are either trusted or have great content that speaks for itself to move to a real domain. The benefits include:

Howdy folks. For a variety of reasons, the PBA needed to move off of my hosting account. So I went ahead and bought y'all two years worth of hosting, and a new domain. Like our last switch, any existing links here will automatically redirect to here.

There's going to be a brief traffic dip, but that should reverse quickly by the first week of January.

Arancaytar is in Charge from Hereon.
The time and actual work he's put into this place makes him the clear choice.

If he can't take on the responsibility, than its up to him to find someone who can.

The Drupal software was updated to version 5.x just now. I'd been putting this off for a while. Partly because I was scared I might royally muck it up (but I was careful with backups), and partly because we have dozens of modules installed that need to be updated separately, and some of them won't have 5.x-compatible versions.

But the update went fine, and I now have the dubious pleasure of installing the modules, one by one, to restore all the functionality of the site.

And a few new ones, too. BBCode, for example, which will hopefully put a stop to the constant site-breaking from unclosed tags.

Regarding blogroll:

Yes, I know you've waited for this for nearly half a year. I'm sorry. I'm working on it. Please be patient for a few more days. Also, some input would be appreciated (read more below)

Hello. Nick's given my administrative access to this site since he does not have the time to maintain it for the moment.

The Blog Roll is currently in a sorry state, not having been updated for what is likely over a year now.

However, Nick has advised me that Blog Rolls may harm the search engine rankings of its members, as the search engine interpret the network as a link farm.

I am currently looking at ways to avoid this - such as adding "rel=nofollow" attributes to the links to make the search engines ignore them - or alternative ways to centralize our blogs without blogrolls - such as a central aggregator that collects all our RSS feeds.

For now, the blog roll is defunct until further notice. Note that even if it does eventually get reinstituted, it will probably not be hosted on blogrolling.com anymore.

Folks, things are back online. Liquidtype.net is NOT the final domain. It was just the only one handy. More info soon...

I’m sorry to announce that the PBA is temporarily halting admission its blogroll. There is talk in the search engine optimization community of some new anti-spam filters that directly effect our little operation.

Apparently, any sudden increase in the number of links to any given URL has resulted in temporary damage to a page’s google traffic. However, the reports I’ve picked up have been vague, and I am not fully convinced that the filters exist, or effect us. Nevertheless, the reason we have this blogroll is to raise the rank of progressive viewpoints and ideas in search results (you didn’t actually think the blogroll itself was supposed to drive traffic, did you? :-P ), so I feel that the temporary closing it is in everyone’s best interest.

In the meantime, I’ve been developing a del.icio.us blogrolling application to solve some complaints of various members, and enhance the collective benefit of our blogroll. Please share any complaints, ideas, or wishes that you might have in this post’s comment box. I actually prefer any criticisms of how things are ‘run’ to be public.

On the 19th this site receieved a DoS attack in the form of 3000 comment spams within a 10 minute period. The attack overloaded our server, and Ace-Net (a web host we do not recommend) in turn, told us to pack our bags and leave. Today, thanks to Aldon Hynes' additional sacrifice of time and money, this site and others are finally back online. If there is one blogger out there that deserves a little something extra in his paypal tip jar, its Aldon. That said, let the posting resume.

I have been pretty busy with other things in my life (e.g. I have taken a paid position as Blogmaster for the DeStefano for Connecticut Governor, 2006 campaign. With that, I haven't been checking this site all that closely. However, today, I got an email from mythicflow about problems with comment and trackback spam. I have created a new page which addresses this. Generally, it should be blank, unless there is spam which is being deleted. I hope I have deleted all the spam, and haven't deleted any important comments. If you have problems with spam, please check this page out. If the problem persists, please contact me.

I believe we are getting trackback spam.  I read on Drupal that there was a way to stop it, simply by turning off the ability for non-registered visitors to reply.  This place might need some moderators, if there aren't some on board already.here is an example, look at the trackbacks here 

A thought provoking analysis of the facts of wages in America. Making a Living, Just Barely- G.W. Bush’s Real Jobs of the 21st Century J.G. Schwam - March 1, 2005 Recently an article in the Palm Beach Sun-Sentinel highlighted a 57% jump in food stamp recipients from December 2000 to December 2004. The cold of heart and the parrots of the right will dismiss this huge increase in aid outlays as laziness and shiftless immigrants milking the system. The numbers underlying this fallacy and the real facts of poverty in America, do not lie. They tell clear hard truths about our nation’s direction and the service based, profit over living wage, Wal-Mart economy of the 21st Century. Read the Complete Article Here: http://liberalpatriot.org/JS%20Archives/js030105living-barely.htm

I have just added a quick and dirty despammer.

It wipes out messages that it thinks are spam. I think it may have had a few false positives, but it wiped out a LOT of spam.

Also, I know that a lot of people don't like the wysiwig editor for blog entries. Personally, I don't like wysiwig, so I have turned it off for me account. Any of you can do this by clicking on 'My account', then the 'Edit' tab, and the uncheck

'Enable rich text editor while authoring'

I hope this helps.

Aldon

Sorry folks, I haven't been able to do very many administrative duties during the past week. I'm not ignoring anyone; I've just been focused on a move, and changing jobs. I've got over 40 requests, and questions from the alliance that I have yet to answer. I'll start getting them taken care of tonight. In addition, some technical problems seem to have developed. I'll work on those. Again, if anyone wants to help out, let me know... its boring work, half of it is tech support, the other half is data entry. All I need is someone reliable to help me with the administrative burden. Again, apologies.

Folks, I'm swamped. I need some help with administering this PBA thing. I just don't have the time to help people get their blogrolls onto their homepages, answer questions, get people added to the blogroll ect... And I'm not saying this because I'm annoyed, I'm actually delighted that so many people are interested in joining our ranks. It's just that I don't feel I have enough time to provide our collective with the responsiveness it deserves. So send me a private message if you're interested in helping me with some of the admin burden.

Also, sorry I've been going crazy with this site's design. The last one just grew to horrify me after 2 days.

PBAHQ has a new look. This theme is not quite done; there are still some corners that need a good sanding. Let me know if your browser experiences any problems, or if you have any other technical or artistic suggestions.

I'm watching you, and I know that you are the same "texas holdem" spammer. You've been systematically testing me. I'd go as far as to say that you think I don't see everything that happens on this site. You seem to be assuming that I might one day say, "oh well, I guess you can spam pages from 6 weeks ago". Let me clear that up: You are a disgusting creature, and your spam aims to exploit the weaknesses of people with gambling addictions. One catch, can bring in a lot of bucks. I consider this site sacred territory, and I consider your spam to be potentially destructive to people's lives. You can spam 800 nodes, and I'll wipe your work clean in exactly 30 seconds. I hope the 2 hours that you dedicated to in tonight's feeble attempt to overwhelm me seems worth it. Don't fuck with me, slime. I take pleasure in seeing how long your work takes, and how quickly I erase it; it just takes one simple drag and click on our MYSQL tables. Friendly word of advice: you might as well spend your time basking in your pathetic porn fantasy world. BTW, comments are temporarily closed to non-registered users. And yes, I track you enough to know that you've read my past messages to you. You live in Cairo, Eygpt... don't you?

The golden age of no rules has ended. From here on, we will not allow this space to be used for the purpose of defending oppressive dictators. (Sorry Bush supporters).