The guys at Hop Studios have just released version 1.0 of their Defensio Combo module for EE. We’ve been testing it for awhile here at SEB and I’m happy to say that I like it better than Akismet. It makes use of the Defensio Anti-Spam service which not only learns from spam and flags it for moderation when it suspects a comment fits the bill, but also keeps track of how well it’s doing on your site and provides you with RSS feeds for tracking moderated comments.

It works more or less similarly to Akismet, but it gives a bit more control over how things are handled and a bit more feedback on how it’s doing. The guys at Hop Studios have been very enthusiastic about the development of this module and are looking to add even more features in the future (I’ve recommended an option that ignores comments from registered members). The module is free for use by anyone running EE 1.6.x so if you’re curious to see what it’s like then go download it and give it a whirl.

Take a picture o’ yourself right now. Don’t change yer clothes, don’t fix yer hair … Just take a picture. Post that picture with NO editin’. Post these instructions with yer picture.

Click to embiggen!

Though I must confess that I did a minor edit to reduce the size of the big version down to a manageable 1024x768, but otherwise it’s completely untouched. Meme seen originally at ***Dave’s blog where his pic is much more attractive.

Things are still a bit wonky with Defensio so I gave Justin some data on the comments being falsely marked as spam as well as some spammy ones falsely marked as OK and he’s going to go do that voodoo that he do and hopefully fix it up right. Meanwhile we’re back on Akismet until the next go-round. I appreciate your patience as we help out a module developer.

Ain’t beta testing fun?

[Update:] The module is still marking some legit comments as spam and moderating them, but it currently doesn’t tell you that your comment has been moderated. I’ve requested that they add that to it so folks won’t think their comments are just being dropped. I’ve also requested that they add an option to have it ignore comments from registered members. If they add that it’ll really make it stand out over Akismet. This is just to let you know that if you don’t immediately see your comment that it’s probably been moderated. I’m hoping the filter will settle down in a day or so and start being a bit more accurate.

——Original post follows——

After some bug fixes I’ve updated and re-enabled the EE Defensio module. And I remember to put the API key back in when I did so. As always let me know if anything seems out of whack.

That is all.

[Update 2:] So I switched back to Akismet and forgot to put the API key back in. Comments should be working now.

As you know we’re beta testing the Defensio module for EE and, like any beta test, there’s bound to be some hiccups. Right now the module is marking every comment as spam and moderating it. This isn’t a huge deal as I just mark them as OK and publish them when I get the chance, but it does mean that your comment may not show up immediately after you post it. I’m working with the author to see if we can’t figure out what’s going wrong and get it fixed ASAP, but if it looks like it’ll be awhile then I’ll switch back to Akismet until a new version is ready. Just wanted to give you guys a heads up as to what’s happening with it.

Oh, and for those that have asked, the Defensio module for EE 1.xx will be free when it’s finally released. They’re not sure about whether or not they’ll charge for the EE 2.0 version as it’ll depend on how much work it takes to port it over.

[Update:] I’ve switched back over to Akismet for the time being until a fix can be found.

Nobody has made a donation in several months and I’m hoping that we’re stable enough financially to be able to handle the web hosting costs without help so I took the donation section down. I did move the Google Ads up to fill that spot for the time being seeing as they are generating a little bit of income, though not enough to support the site anytime soon.

Just a FYI.

Oh, and at some point I plan to go through and revise the SEB Cafe Press store that most of you have probably forgotten we have. If any of you are particularly creative and have ideas for T-shirts you’re dieing to try out, well, we could use a few new designs.

Justin Crawford of HOP Studios has created a new anti-comment spam module combo for ExpressionEngine that makes use of the Defensio service and we’re giving it a go here at SEB. It’s similar to Akismet in most respects, but gives a little more control over how comments are handled. So for the moment I’ve disabled Akismet and enabled Defensio and we’ll see how it goes. We get a fair amount of comment spam here so it shouldn’t be too long before we know if it works better or worse than Akismet.

As always, let me know if anything looks wonky or doesn’t work.

Some twelve or so SEB members got spammed through our mail system today by someone going by the name of “lucie” and I would like to apologize for the inconvenience. Your emails haven’t been revealed as it was done through EE’s built in mail system which doesn’t reveal it to the sender. The person who did the spamming had to send each message individually so it took some time. They started around 7:14AM and sent the last message at 10:44AM. The spam itself was a variant of the classic Nigerian scam and the account has been banned.

Again, my apologies. On the bright side this method of spamming is slow and bothersome enough (thanks to captchas among other things) that the number of people affected remains low.

The folks over at The Atheist Spot are starting a week-long series of interviews with prominent atheist bloggers. Lenny contacted me and asked if I’d be willing to be interviewed and I told him that I wasn’t sure how prominent I was, but that I’d be happy to participate. They have their first interview with Craig A. James from The Religion Virus up already and it’s an interesting read.

I just got done submitting the answers to the questions I was sent a few moments ago. Not sure how interesting I am and if you’re a long-time SEB reader then some of it you’ve heard before, but what the hell, it’s always fun to be interviewed. Well, so long as it’s not because of a sex scandal or something like that. Though I’d imagine that would go a long way to increasing the page hits for SEB.

So be sure to check out the series as it goes live and perhaps you’ll find a couple of other places worth dropping in on. One of these days I’ll get around to adding a “submit this entry to Atheist Spot” icon to the list at the bottom of my entries as I’ve yet to take advantage of that site to promote SEB.

This is embarrassing. Paul Sunstone over Café Philos was cool enough to make up his own Sun Mountain awards to hand out to other blogs he thought were award-worthy and on May 24th, 2008 he awarded the 10th one to SEB. I did notice at the time and I sent him a thank you note about it and said I’d proudly display the award on the site…

...and then got distracted by a shiny object and totally forgot about it.

Now some two months from when we were given the award I’m just getting around to mentioning it publicly and again thanking Paul. Hopefully he’s not too offended by the fact that I let it slip my mind because I really did appreciate getting it to begin with. As you can see from the sidebar we’re not exactly overflowing with accolades here at SEB so the fact that Paul went through the trouble to make a special graphic and all was really cool. It doesn’t hurt that we were in the top 10 on the list either.

Awhile back someone, I think it was Ingolfson, started up an official SEB article on Wikipedia which I thought was pretty cool. There’s not a whole lot there, but it gives a nice brief overview of what the blog is about. I don’t normally pay it much attention, but every now and then the referrer log will show that someone came to SEB from our Wikipedia entry and I’ll drop by to see if anything has changed.

Today I noticed that something has changed. One of the sections lists off the taglines I’ve used for the blog. Up until this past July 2nd there were only two entries in that section. Today I found that some anonymous person had added the following third tagline:

I’m an asshat and don’t know what I’m talking about. - (under headline of title page)

I found that extremely amusing and I’m giving it serious consideration as a possible tagline. I actually LOLed. To think someone cared enough to go through the trouble to edit Wikipedia just to criticize me. I’m very touched.

I’ve been kicking around the possibility of renaming my blog. Stupid Evil Bastard isn’t its first name, originally it was called Wandering Randomly Amongst The Blogs which, in retrospect, is kinda stupid. It became SEB on April 14, 2002 and has served us well ever since. There are two reasons I’ve been debating a name change:

First, and this could just be me, but I think I’ve mellowed out a bit since I first started blogging and my rants aren’t quite as ranty as they once were. The words “Stupid Evil Bastard” tend to put a certain angry-blogger expectation into people’s heads when they arrive for the first time and I’m not sure I’m living up to that image anymore. I’m really not all that stupid or evil for that matter, though I suppose some would say the bastard label fits fairly well.

Second, it could actually impact the reputation of an old friend of mine. I’ve only mentioned his name a couple of times over the years, and I won’t repeat it here because it’d bring SEB up in hits on Google for his name, but you can see them in the links I provided. One is in the main entry itself and the second one is in the comments where I posted pics in an attempt to prove how geeky I looked as a young man. That old friend of mine has gone on to work for a number of big charitable organizations over the years and is now one of the VPs for the Knight Foundation. Needless to say, reputation is everything when you hold the sort of job he holds so when you do a Google search for his name and one of the links that comes up contains the words “Stupid Evil Bastard” in it, well, you can imagine how there are some folks out there that could misconstrue things. At the moment SEB is link number 52 in a Google search which makes it high enough that a lot of folks will still see it. I’ve known this guy since Kindergarten and while we had a bit of a falling out shortly after he got out of college, we’ve recently been getting caught up with each other. I still consider him a very dear friend and it’s certainly the oldest of the friendships I still have. I’d love to talk about him more, but I don’t because I know it would show up in Google eventually.

When it was just my own reputation that might take a hit from the name it wasn’t a big deal, though I’m sure it’s probably played a part in how long it took me to land jobs after being laid off. Still the only person I thought I was harming with it was myself and that was the price I pay for being me. Now I find myself wondering if there’s any other friends I’ve written about over the years who have been inconvenienced by having SEB show up in search results for their name on Google. I know there’s plenty of people I’ve ranted about that weren’t happy to have SEB show up in Google searches for them.

The whole situation is somewhat reminiscent of my realization that I probably should have used a pseudonym from the beginning had it occurred to me that it would become so popular so as to protect my own rep on Google searches when I was laid off. So I’m left feeling a little torn about a name that I have a bit of a fondness for, but which may not be the best choice out of the ones I was considering. Though I have to admit that the other name I was considering—Young Militant Santas For A Better Tomorrow—arguably wasn’t much better. If I stick with SEB I’ll probably go through the couple of old entries and edit out my friend’s name (and pic in one case) in hopes that Google will eventually drop SEB from his Google searches and I’ll be a lot more self-conscious about names of friends and family members I use in blog entries. If I change the name it’ll still take awhile for some of the old entries to drop from Google searches, but the problem should work itself out over time, but there’s the problem of what the hell do I switch the name to? Nothing I’ve come up with so far has tickled my fancy all that much so that’s a problem in its own right. Of course the third option would be to scrap the whole thing as it currently stands and start over from a new beginning with an empty archive and a new name. A fourth option would be to pack it in and drop blogging altogether, but I’m not sure I’m at that point yet. While I think I’m not blogging up to past standards I still think I have enough to say to keep going at this for awhile.

I figured I’d air these thoughts and see what you guys think. I’ve known several people who have changed their blog’s name and even started over from scratch and are as popular today as they ever were. Have any of you other bloggers entertained similar thoughts? What did you decide to do and why? And if I were to change the name, what do you think would be a fitting one?

You really have to admire the chutzpah of some of these assholes who push craptastic products by spamming the fuck out of every webstie they can find. Someone registered an account with the user name “.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)” and then submitted the following bit of spam:

How I removed my moles and skin tags at home with this amazing paste- award winning ingredients!!!

It’s true, I had this huge mole near my eye. I had had it for over 30 years and no signs of cancer, it was just plain BIG!  This nurse friend who stapled my ear for weight loss also told me about this molepaste (#1 natural mole and wart remover) that you can get [craptastic URL removed]

Benefits:
You can do it at home
Less expensive than a doctor’s fee
only one 20 minute application then the area gets naturally cauterized
most won’t scar
natural ingredients

To see more before and afters go to [craptastic URL removed].

You’ve gotta be a major league asshole to think you’d be allowed to post a spam entry on the front page of a blog without being called on it. Perhaps if SEB hadn’t been updated in a year or two and was more or less a dead blog I could see someone trying this sort of thing, but on a live blog? That takes being an asshole to a whole new level.

Or most of the other social websites that are out there. Twitter is wildly popular, but it seems like the sort of thing you’d use if you didn’t have a blog. Here’s what it’s for according to their about page:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Why? Because even basic updates are meaningful to family members, friends, or colleagues—especially when they’re timely.

• Eating soup? Research shows that moms want to know.
• Running late to a meeting? Your co–workers might find that useful.
• Partying? Your friends may want to join you.

With Twitter, you can stay hyper–connected to your friends and always know what they’re doing. Or, you can stop following them any time. You can even set quiet times on Twitter so you’re not interrupted.

Twitter puts you in control and becomes a modern antidote to information overload.

As much as my mother loves me dearly, I’m not sure she’d really give a shit to know that I’m, at this very moment, eating soup. My co-workers would probably appreciate a phone call over a twitter entry and if I’m partying then my friends probably already know about it. In short it sounds like a service that promotes the sharing of trivial minutiae at a level that makes blogging look like high journalism in comparison.

The only reason I’m even thinking about it at the moment is because of this TechCrunch entry about it wherein they talk about how Twitter is suffering from major problems with high traffic loads. Whereas Twitter fans usually bitch up a storm when the service fails lately they’ve been doing something else: switching to a competitor:

But that magic is created by the simple Reply feature - when you add “@TechCrunch” to a Twitter message, it tells me you are saying something directly to me, to start a new conversation or reply to an existing one. Without Reply, Twitter turns into a one way telephone conversation. Pulling the feature out is equivalent to a frontal lobotomy - Twitter is still walking around, but there’s a blank stare in its eyes.

So why aren’t people screaming about the feature being gone? Because this time, they’re just heading over to Friendfeed to have those very same conversations. Friendfeed for most users was just a place to bookmarks all their activities on other social networks. Now, more and more, it’s a place that people start conversations. The early adopters got that a while ago. Now, the not so early adopters are using it as a Twitter replacement, too.

As an example the author links to an entry he made on FriendFeed that spawned a whole conversation. It’s a one sentence entry about how he should be blogging, but keeps looking at the ocean and thinking of playing with his dog. It has 40 some odd replies, none of which are more than a sentence or two long themselves.

It appears, to my eyes anyway, to be a form of mini-blogging and I’m not sure why you wouldn’t just use a blog to do it. I mean, I can understand why he didn’t post something like that to TechCrunch, but for me it seems like it’s redundant when I already blog about whatever trivial thing catches my attention anyway. It just makes for another site someone would have to go to or subscribe to in order to catch up on what I’m following. I already feel bad enough about the fact that I’ve been relying on Google Reader sharing to pass along items I can’t be bothered to blog about.

And what the fuck is Facebook all about anyway? According to their site:

Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you.

OK, so how is that different from what Twitter says it does? You can’t see much of the service without signing up, but it looks like a less obnoxious version of MySpace and MySpace always struck me as the white trash equivalent of blogging only with even more inane content than the average blog and a design aesthetic bordering on the criminal.  Is Facebook more like LinkedIn? I do have a profile on LinkedIn because it appears aimed more at networking for possible jobs, but I’ve not done a very good job of setting up my profile yet.

As I said, maybe it’s a sign that I’m getting old, but I just don’t get the point of all these services. At least not if you already have a blog to call home. It just seems like it makes for more places people have to go to find out what you’re up to when they could just pick up the phone or drop you an email and say, “Where the hell have you been?”

I just got done putting up a badge for Barack Obama in the sidebar because that’s who I’ll be voting for come this fall. When I checked to see if it was showing up properly I noticed that the Google ad further down was a flash ad for John McCain. It’s been showing up a lot on various SEB pages as of late to the extent that you’d almost think I was endorsing him, which is part of why I put up the Obama badge.

I haven’t checked into if it’s possible to tell Google’s AdSense that you don’t want certain ads to be displayed on your site, but I might look into it given the frequency that the McCain ad shows up. Hilariously it shows up most often on pages where I’m bitching about what a hypocritical sell out he is.