Category: Technology

Fake forum registrations – why would anyone do it? Most fake registrations include a website link in their profile, which is then published in the forum memberlist when their registration is submitted. Spammers take advantage of this to help improve their search engine ranking (Google is an important search engine which uses ‘relevancy’ to rank a listing. This includes checking for links from other sites) and drive traffic to their website.

There are two main types of spammers – bots and humans. Bot spammers are usually the easier of the two to deal with. Visual confirmation is one of the most effective weapons. a randomly generated set of numbers/letters that have to be confirmed by a person manually typing the information into the registration form. Changing some of the common file names and variables can also be effective against bots.

Much harder to foil are human spammers. These are people who seemingly spend all day visiting forum sites, filling out registration forms to get their website link ‘out there’.

One forum site I manage is run on the popular phpBB forum software, and gets several fake registrations a day. After implementing the visual confirmation option, enforcing Admin activation only and making some other small anti-bot changes I’ve realised the only way to slow down these spammers is to make it impossible for them to include their website link in their profile when they register.

I utilised this MOD to remove the website and signature fields from the registration form. I’m keeping my fingers crossed with this that it will cut down the rubbish.

I need to thrash out a few ideas on this project which has (embarrassingly) been on the boil for a very long time.

About three years ago I discovered a locally produced online business directory website, which hadn’t been worked on in years. I thought the site had potential, so I contacted the owner, Ray and asked if he was looking for some help with the site.

The upshot of this was, in return for hosting another of Ray’s domain names I could take over the development of the directory, and keep whatever income I made from it.

The directory is localbiz.com.au and initially I converted the existing site to php/mysql with the listings sorted into Australian locations. I wasn’t really happy with this – most of the existing listings were old and didn’t even have websites, and I was filtering a huge number of new submissions which were just spam from overseas.

In addition to this, the concept of splitting the directory into locations seemed a little too ambitious – since I don’t have the resources to develop something along the lines of CitySearch or Yellow Pages. On the other hand, confining the location to a particular area was a little too restrictive for my liking (despite the name “localbiz” – how do you define “local” on the internet?).

I had a brainwave over the weekend to put the name issue aside, and concentrate on the type of business listing that I am truly interested in promoting – home and/or internet based businesses.

They must all be Australian of course, and the listings will be free in return for a reciprocal link – with the option of purchasing paid positioning (eg. banner ad). I want to keep it low cost, but at the same time maintain relevant listings. I don’t expect to make a great deal of money from it, but hopefully it will create networking opportunities and help boost search engine rankings.

I have the programming in place so it has all the functionality I want; I’ve started populating the database, so now it is down to the design of the site. I want it to be upbeat yet simple.

Off to consider some design concepts!

Well it’s amazing how a minor success can increase one’s sense of jubilation. My new business name “Web Wench” was registered today and my mind is working on all the things I need to do to get my new business organised!

NOW: Working two or three days a week for Melissa on ISP helpdesk; picking up occasional bits of web development work though not really trying. Half-hearted running of company and systems. Procrastination Queen.

Things to do:

• develop a web site for Web Wench
• restructure my business from company to sole trader
• get my ad into the local business directory
• build my clientele with local community groups and small business people

IN 12 MTHS: I enjoy working for Melissa, hope to still be working there a couple of days a week. Would like to have a few more web sites under my belt and more regular work in. Would like to have a couple of “money making” web sites going. Don’t want to be rich, just independent and help Hubby pay off the mortgage.

A sudden storm wiped out my ADSL broadband yesterday afternoon, quite an inconvenience when I had customers ringing and needed my internet connection.

So it’s back to dialup for a little while, until my new modem arrives. I am getting a four port wireless model from Netcomm.

Dialup’s not so bad really, I’m not a speed junkie I am more into the convenience aspect of broadband. It would be far, far worse to have no internet access (perish the thought!)

It could have been worse, fortunately I had my computer plugged into my new UPS.

My PC has been having performance issues of late; I’ve collected a lot of software I rarely use so I think it might be time to evaluate what I need, backup my data to CD-Rom, re-format and reinstall!

Not including device drivers for printer, camera, CD burner etc here is what I couldn’t do without:

• Mozilla Firefox
• Paint Shop Pro
• MYOB (business accounting package)
• Open Office – the Microsoft alternative
• Adobe Acrobat Reader
• eTrust anti-virus
• Ad-Aware anti-spyware

Now here are some commercial programs I currently use a lot, but they seem to be resource hungry and I am always getting Windows errors with them:

• Macromedia Homesite
• Ipswich WS_FTP

I am thinking of replacing them with NVU and Filezilla respectively. I am also replacing my copy of WinZip with 7-Zip, since the latter seems to open many more archive files than the commercial program. It is disgusting that software I have paid money for is less satisfactory than its open source counterpart!

A couple of non-essentials but nice to haves are:

• Putty telnet client
• Skype and Yahoo messenger
• Xara Webstyle
• Gmail Notifier