Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
In lieu of writing this evening, I have decided to attack the 7000+ individual items of comment spam that have flooded into the server. As per our long-standing strategy to take over the internet, this collection of spam helped elevate our rank in the search engines, but overall creates far more static than anything funny (though sometimes, of course, it's pretty funny).
Some of the crew have been waiting patiently to contribute to this website once I get it switched to Drupal. One of the major barriers was getting the comment spam cleaned up. I want to import the comments into the new site, but I sure as hell don't want all that spam messing up the process. A little bit of spam, perhaps, for fun, but not all that shit.
So now we are already down to 1,464 from some 7000+. Basically once it's down to a few hundred, that will be good enough. Of course, I also gotta close off many old stories to comments, since those are the ones that get pounded by spammers.
If anyone's real comments got deleted, I am really sorry. I personally glanced over each entry and I hope none of the good stuff got nailed. When I switched over to PowWeb, all the old comments from the last site got detached, even a really interesting thread by a few Turks on the Kurtlar Vadisi Irak story. With a bit more engineering I'll get the old (also spam-filtered) comments back up onto the new site.
So to recap, this was one of the shittiest steps to deal with before going to Drupal. Now it's basically ready to go!! On the content side, that is.
Posted by HongPong at August 8, 2006 01:12 AM