29th December 2003, early evening | Comments (28)
Well well, after a nice break for Christmas, I returned to my blog to find two rather annoying things: firstly some complete arse has taken to posting aggressive and rude comments here; and secondly, that a very busy site had linked directly to the three greetings cards I displayed in an earlier post, with no mention of me or my site (I left a comment, but they didn’t do anything about it).
How was I to deal with those two things with a tummy full of turkey?
The bandwidth thieves were easy to deal with, I simply altered my .htaccess file to map any external requests for images to a *cough* pornographic *cough* image. This means that for the last four days, when the site in question has requested the images from my server, an interesting scene involving numerous men and a hard working lady has been sent in their place.
Normally I wouldn’t have taken such measures, but I was rather annoyed at the large amount of hits my server has taken through this site, and the fact that I got no mention in their post at all. Hopefully it’ll teach them not to be so anti-social.
You might be wondering why they haven’t taken the porn down and made local copies of the funny cards? Well, the slightly amusing thing about this is that because the path to the image isn’t altered by the .htaccess file, if you already have my cards in your browser cache you won’t see the porno image, only the original pictures you downloaded from my site. So to the cache-viewing site owners the page still shows the three greetings cards. To all the new visitors though, their front page will have taken on a slightly racier tone.
The code I’m using to stop bandwidth leaching from this specific site is:
#RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?foobar\.com/ [NC]#RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ images/nohotlink.jpg [L]You can find other examples on the altlab site.
(I’ll probably instigate a nicer, global rule as well, pointing towards a child-friendly 403 page with a full explanation of why bandwidth theft and nicking content is a bad thing.)
The rude guy was slightly less easy to deal with, but his actions did spur me on to write a comment moderation script, as well as an IP address blocker.
The comment moderation script is active, by default, on any posts over a week old (though I can activate it on any post) and seems to be working fine. The IP blocker is still a bit beta — it works fine (denying access to the comment form for those bad boys and girls) but at the moment I don’t know how to differentiate between static and dynamic IPs, so in theory I could end up punishing an innocent user. I am trying to find a way around this though, and if anyone knows how to differentiate between static and dynamic IPs I’d appreciate a comment below.
This is what blocked users will see in place of the comment form:
Commenting from your IP address is not allowed. At some point in the past a user with your IP address has written something (usually offensive) which has resulted in the blocking of this feature. If you feel there’s been some mistake then please contact me and we can see about un-blocking you.
This was the first time I’d ever had offensive comments on my site (or by email) and I must say it was extremely frustrating. I longed to find the guy and throttle some sense in to him — nothing makes me madder than being called something I’m not, and having to deal with people who won’t see sense.
However, I responded to his comments in a sensible, informative way, putting straight his misconceptions and asking for his contact information so we could continue the discussion by email, but he simply ignored the facts I presented to him and came back with more abuse. After three bouts of crap-and-reply, crap-and-reply, crap-and-reply I gave in and wiped him out the database — I don’t see why I should have to put up with that sort of thing on my own site (especially when it was all unfounded).
I don’t want anyone to have a bad impression of me, and generally do all I can to show people I’m a very friendly, open chap, but when someone is so obviously filled with spite there’s little you can do to change their mind.
Someone else also posted an inflammatory comment, but I left that one in, thinking that at least I could use their words to illustrate a point.
Ah well, at least my blogging software is better for the experience.
Jump up to the start of the post ↑
A collection of miscellaneous links that don't merit a main blog posting, but which are interesting none-the-less.
Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.— George W Bush (9)
Stuff from the intersection of design, culture and technology.(3)
A selection of blogs I read on a regular basis.