PrefBlog

User registration has now been enabled, as I have now ticked the “Membership [] Anyone can register” box in the administrative settings. You must be logged in to comment.

A link to the registration process may now be found in the right-hand navigation panel under the heading “meta”.

Sorry about that, folks!

One problem I’m having is with comment spam (many hundreds of spam comments per day) … we’ll see what changes, if any, this brings.

There are lots of ‘bots about! Within seconds – literally! – of my posting this there were registrations by “VeraJeppesen”, “WeldonWeindorfe”, and “JuliShannon”, who have many things they’d like to share with us about Mulberry outlets, wholesale jerseys and NFL jerseys.

Update, 2013-12-11: As noted in the comments:

Assiduous Readers are required to register prior to commenting on my posts, which helps reduce the volume of spam. In turn, registration requires that the A.R. respond to an eMail that will be sent automatically and immediately upon completion of the registration form

If you do not receive this eMail, it has probably been intercepted by your software or ISP as spam. Try sending an eMail to wordpress@prefblog.com; this will usually result in your being able to receive future eMails. Then you may log in; tell the machine you have forgotten your password and it will eMail one to you.

Sorry about all this rigamarole. If all else fails, send me an eMail and I’ll sort things out.

I am very relieved to announce that the importation of posts from the Old Server to the New Server has been completed, at least as far as I know. The Partial Importation took place on November 27.

I’ve also been able to upload the various images and post attachments that have accumulated over the years.

I regret that importing the posts for the last two years required me to resurrect the Old Server as the official PrefBlog host for a day; perhaps that wouldn’t have been necessary if I knew what I was doing, but it wouldn’t have been necessary if WordPress’ programmers knew what they were doing either, so I win. I’ve alerted WordPress to the problem, but it doesn’t look like anybody’s very interested.

However, I’ve lost all my links on the right-hand navigation panel. Those will be straightforward, if rather tedious, to recreate and I hope to accomplish this job in bits and pieces over the next little while.

Additionally, Assiduous Readers seeking to point out all my mistakes, absurdities and other shortcomings in the comments will have to re-register. Sorry!

Assiduous Readers will notice that most posts from the old server have been imported successfully.

Alert Assiduous Readers will further notice that the last two years are missing.

I don’t know why.

I will attempt to figure this out once I’ve calmed down a little.

Update: There are 1,163 missing posts; everything with a post ID >= 16,886. Oddly, #16869 was successfully imported, but #16864 was skipped. This cutoff point looks suspiciously close to 2^14 = 16,384, but I don’t know if that’s significant.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

As many of you will know, my old server is retiring after seven years or so of sterling service.

A new server has been rented and is now hosting several sites, PrefInfo.com among them. I am now transferring the others.

This will probably involve PrefBlog being down for a while, for the period between propogation of the DNS change and the time when I upload the data to the new server – for reasons that I don’t understand and my simply reflect my lack of knowledge, I can’t install the PrefBlog software and data on the new machine until the DNS change has propogated.

So long, 70.86.75.42 ! It’s time for 184.172.98.210 to take over!

It took me five-years-odd to reach 100,100 spam comments marked for deletion … another 86,509 have been removed for this New Year’s Cleaning!

Isn’t the Internet wonderful?

Hymas Investment Management Inc. is required to have a Complaint Examination Policy due to its registration with the Autorité des marchés financiers.

Accordingly, a Complaints Policy has been prepared and is linked on the corporate website through the page Ethical Standards.

In the post 100,100 Spam Comments Deleted from PrefBlog (which got a spam comment an hour ago), the suggestion was made that first-time comments be held for moderation. This proposal was seconded and passed unanimously.

Accordingly, first time comments will be held for moderation – I will approve almost anything that isn’t spam.

The spam has really slowed down in the New Year – only about 100 per day, down from the peak of about 500/day reached in early- to mid-December; but I’m making the change anyway.

One of the great curses of internet blogs is spam comments.

On PrefBlog, I have an ‘open comment’ policy – you have to sign in, but comments are posted immediately (they are not held for approval). If anybody wants to comment, I say, then what’s the big deal?

Many dubious characters take advantage of this and post links to their malware sites, scraper sites, ad-sites, you name it. There are various ‘bulk pinging’ sites on the net that makes this easy for script-kiddies. It’s annoying and if there’s too much spam on the site then Google et al. will assume that the site itself is spam – not something I want for PrefBlog.

So my blog software allows for the automatic checking of posted comments, blacklisting some and holding others for moderation, depending on whether it matches anything in a specified list of keywords. One of my daily tasks is to clean out the comments and update my keyword lists.

And today I reached a milestone: over 100,000 spam comments have been posted since PrefBlog began publishing. And today I’ve greatly reduced the size of the database by permanently deleting all comments marked as spam.

Other statistics of interest: 4,302 posts in 32 categories; 6,833 approved comments (mostly trackbacks, in which one post refers to another and leaves a track-back comment. I like this feature).