25/05/2009

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24/05/2009

Banishing Spammers and Trolls with .htaccess Files


In a guest post, Neil Matthews of WPDude.com writes about how comment spammers and trolls can be banished from your site by blocking their IP address using the .htaccess file.

Are you plagued by spammers and trolls inside of the comments section of your blog? If you are, I want to give you a simple little trick to kick them off your blog and keep them out by blocking their IP address.

I decided to use this technique on my own site when I noticed that 80% of my comment spam was coming from about five IP addresses. Enough was enough, although I was capturing the spammers using Akismet, I wanted to stop these people in their tracks. They were not welcome on my site.

This post is written with a WordPress bias, but check out your webserver and if it uses .htaccess there is a good chance you can adopt the techinques described here.

What is the .htaccess file?

The .htacess file is a web server level configuration file which sets certain rules for visitors to your site. It works at a level below WordPress (or any other blogging platform) analyses certain aspects of your web browsers interaction with the web server and if certain rules are met, you can generate an action.

In the example I am about to show, the rule is to check an IP address and the action is to restrict access.

.htaccess configuration is a huge topic. It can be used for redirection and a host of other functions. Much deeper reading can be found at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/howto/htaccess.html

Finding The Offenders IP address

WordPress does a great job helping you to discover the commentors IP address. Simply go to the comment section in your WordPress dashboard or to your spam moderation folder and below the email address and website is the IP address of the commentor. This is collected by WordPress for you.

Editing Your .htacess file

Lets start with a word of warning you can seriously damage your blog if you amend .htaccess incorrectly so take a backup of your file before you make any changes. I like to download the file to my local machine take a copy and edit the the original before uploading it back to my web server.

Some geekery for you, on unix or linux systems any file begining with a full stop/period is marked as a hidden file, and you will probably not be able to see the .htaccess file in the root of your WordPress installation by default. You will need to enable hidden files on your ftp client. I use Filezilla and that is located under server -> force show hidden files. Your ftp client will vary but the option will be there somewhere.

The default .htaccess file

A default WordPress .htaccess file will look like this:

# BEGIN WordPress

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

</IfModule>

# END WordPress

As you can see it has a number of re-write rules for wordpress and very little else.

What To Add

To block a particular IP address add the following lines below the #END WordPress section, replacing the details inside of {} with real IP addresses or host names.

#block spammers and troll's IP addresses

order allow,deny

deny from {IP ADDRESS}

deny from {SECOND IP ADDRESS ONE PER LINE}

deny from {YOU CAN ALSO USE DOMAIN NAME trollhostname.com}

allow from all

# END spammers and trolls

Edit your .htaccess file with a text editor add your exclusions then upload it back to the root of your blog installation overwriting the old .htacess file.

Testing Your Changes

Any IP address added to the exclusion list will not be allowed access to your web server and a 403 forbidden message will be returned. The message from my web server is shown below:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access / on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

You can test it works by leaving a test comment on your blog getting your IP address and adding it the the .htaccess file. Remember to take it out again or you will not have access to your blog.

It is Not Fool Proof

This work around is not fool proof, it comes with some limitations and they are:

  • Proxies - if you offender is behind a proxy IP address then anybody else using that same address will be banned. Some ISPs will use a shared IP address so everyone using that ISP will be banned from yoru site. Use with care.
  • Spoofing IP address - if your troll is particularly tech litereate they could spoof their IP address or use another one, they will then get through your barrier.

Using another machine - your troublesome visitor could simply go to a friends machine or to an internet cafe and get a new IP address.

Wrap Up

As mentioned this is not a fool proof way to stop offenders, but blocking IP addresses is a great way of stopping comment bots from fixed addresses and a way of sending out a real warning to trolls that there type of comments are not welcome.

If you use this trick in conjunction with anti-spam plugins and comment moderation techniques you should be able to reduce your spam and deter trolls.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.


02/05/2009

How To Make Money Fast Online

Author: Allen Irwin

The question has come into everyone's mind at one point or another."How do I make money fast?" Luckily for everyone who has ever had that question come to mind there is an answer! There are several ways to make money quickly online, now we will venture through the online category.

3 websites to make money online.

1. Associated Content.
2. Cash Crate.
3. Forum booster.

Let's begin with associated content. Associated content should be the number one stop for those people who frequently ask themselves, how I could make money fast. Associated Content requires you to write content, which in other words for those who aren't familiar with the online language, content means articles.

Associated Content requires that you write articles for them, they will pay you anywhere from $3 to $40 for your content.

Most of the time however the bids that they place on your content are for much less than $10. However, this is still a great way to make money online if you can type several articles per day. You may be surprised to see how easy it has become to earn a part time income through writing for Associated Content.

The next site that we will talk about is Cash Crate. Cash Crate is a site that pays you to take surveys. They may pay anywhere from a dollar to possibly a hundred dollars, just for you to take a survey.

Doesn't sound too bad now does it? The reason they pay you to complete surveys is that companies are willing to shell out loads of cash for in-depth information from their consumers to find out exactly what they word on the street is about their product or services.

They even have a daily survey on the homepage that is guaranteed to make you some extra income; the guaranteed survey on the homepage pays $0.80. It may not seem like much but do the math, over a 30 day time period. That is almost $30 extra dollars just for taking surveys.

Are you still asking yourself that question, how do I make money fast? Well if writing tons of articles and taking surveys doesn't really sound like your cup of tea, there is always the alternative of Forum Booster.

Forum Booster is a website that pays you $0.10 for each post you make on a forum. This is great for those of us that would be searching and posting on forums either way, why not get paid for it? If you can post sixty posts in 1 hour, you can make $6, which is not that bad for earning money online.

It may not be minimum wage, but you have the advantage of being in the comfort of your own home. You can be in your pajamas sipping coffee while working on posting on these forums. Each post should be a minimum of 12 words, which is not difficult to do at all.

Overall there are tons of ways to make money quickly online but these are just the tried and true and the best of the best.

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