I’m using Drupal 4.6 and thought that I had a solid way to keep the comment spam at bay, but have received about 200 gambling spam comments in the past few days. For anyone who really knows a lot about Drupal, I’m seeking help (or at least a pointer to the right thread on Drupal.org).
I have set my posts so that only the recent ones allow comments. For the past few months this has meant no comment spam because most of the spam bots look for older posts. However, in the past I have created nodes that were subsequently deleted. This means that "jarche.com/node/151" does not exist when you look for it. The bot is able to post a comment to it because (I assume) I did not turn off the comment feature before I deleted the post. Other than turning off comments completely (which I do not want to do), what are my options?
I have already turned off the trackback function as I have received one spam trackback every two minutes for the past several months.
Help!
To give you an idea of the scope of this spam attack, the +200 comments that have stuck have been accompanied by over 3,800 comments over four days that were rejected by the system. This does not include the thousands of trackback spams that are submitted to this site each day. My logs read like a bunker under fire.
PS: My thanks to Boris Mann for his help via e-mail.
Business Blog Consulting
I’ve been reading Rick Bruner’s Business Blog Consulting for almost two years now but recently he was slowing down due to other commitments. Rick has now invited a number of very good writers to contribute on a regular basis and all of a sudden the site is becoming "the" place for discussions around the business side of blogging. If you’re interested at all in the two-way web and what it can do for business then stay tuned to BBC.
ATutor 1.5 with Ewiki
First it was Moodle that came with a wiki and now ATutor has the ErfurtWiki included as an add-on. I have found wikis to be excellent tools for collaborative work and learning, especially the development of policies and procedures with geographically distributed groups. There are now at least two open source learning systems with collaborative wikis included. I can only see this as a positive step for learners, as well as anyone looking for a "made in Canada" learning system.
Firefox goes Private
Over the past several months the Firefox browser has been gradually gaining market share (+8%) over MS Internet Explorer. According to Forbes.com , the Mozilla Foundation, owner of Firefox, is now creating a private company to take advantage of any business opportunities while still keeping Firefox open source. Firefox currently generates money on the drop-down search menus but there seems to be much more potential.
It’s going to be interesting in the near future when the Mozilla Foundation, a not-for-profit, becomes the major rival of Microsoft, Adobe, et al. This model of a private venture, owned by a non-profit and based on open source software may become the new technology business model. I think that there will be a lot to learn here for anyone looking at launching a new technology venture. It’s about time that things were shaken up a bit.
Edublogs
From James Farmer is this notice about Edublogs, a "totally unique project aimed at teachers, researchers, writers and educators the world over. Basically you get to set up a free WordPress blog, 10MB of upload space (extending to much much more down the line), an enormous stack of beautiful themes and to be part of a unique community. You could use a blog to record and annotate important resources and ideas, to propose and discuss anything under the sun, to progressively develop your thesis, to publicise and discuss your publications with the world or just to develop your digital identity. Either way, http://edublogs.org is a no-strings-attached, open source, ongoing and freely available service for you and you’re invited to take part! If you’ve got any questions, please feel free to contact James Farmer at james[at]edublogs(dot)org".
If you are an educator and have not taken the plunge into blogs for learning, then this supportive community, including knowledgeable and friendly James, is the best place to start. James has helped me out many times with advice and information and is very passionate about learning.
Small Business Blogging
I had previously mentioned how traditional businesses could use blogs. Small Business Trends now reports that one in ten small businesses in the US are planning on using blogs in their marketing strategy.
As a micro-business, I have no doubt about the value of blogging, especially for free-agents. Most business blogs seem to be in IT-intensive fields but they can also work for more traditional businesses. Two examples – Landfair Furniture in Oregon and The Lincoln Sign Company .
Like e-mail, I think that blogs will become ubiquitous in the near future as the Early Adopters have already moved to blogs.
Are there other examples of more traditional small businesses using blogs? I know about the consultants, writers and techies, but what about companies with less than 100 employees who are blogging in order to have real conversations with people?
Culture is Everything
Anyone who has worked as a consultant or on an external/internal project knows about culture and change. It’s what can make or break a project. Fast Company has a quick note on the importance of culture, it’s organisational DNA, and gives this how-to list:
Something to try:
Consider the team/group/organization you’re leading
1. Look at your vision/mission statement and jot down the behaviors that everyone supposedly follows.
2. On a second list jot down the behaviors that everyone actually follows.
3. Pick the one discrepancy that annoys you the most.
4. Make it a top priority to change it.
5. Have a conversation with colleagues on why each of you think the discrepancy exists.
6. Agree on some structures to put in place to ensure that change happens (communication, processes, rewards etc).
Consider the team/group/organization you’re leading
1. Look at your vision/mission statement and jot down the behaviors that everyone supposedly follows.
2. On a second list jot down the behaviors that everyone actually follows.
3. Pick the one discrepancy that annoys you the most.
4. Make it a top priority to change it.
5. Have a conversation with colleagues on why each of you think the discrepancy exists.
6. Agree on some structures to put in place to ensure that change happens (communication, processes, rewards etc).
I’m not sure that it’s ever this easy to address culture issues but these "discrepancies" can spell the death of any project. If you can spot them early, they can also be indicators of projects to avoid.
Marketing Hype & Reality – Connection Speed
I previously complained that my ISP, Aliant (a Bell company), was only providing me with 10 MB of e-mail space for my $45 per month while Gmail now gives me 2428 MB of storage for free. My peeve right now is advertised versus real connection speeds.
According to the Aliant website, my Highspeed Ultra is supposed to give me "up to" 5 Mbps. Jay Cross has recently referred to this connection speed checker and my connection speeds are 1.2 Mbps down and 0.44 up, a far cry from the advertised speed. Another speed checker is Wugnet, with a neat visual interface, which clocked me even slower at 1.06 down and 0.18 up.
If you are in Atlantic Canada and have a highspeed internet connection, I’d appreciate it if you checked your speed and posted it, either here or somewhere else. If my case is not an anomally, then Aliant and its competitors should know about it.
Update: I checked with tech support at Aliant and was informed that one of the issues could be that my telephone extension cable was too long. According to Aliant, my ethernet cable can be almost any length but the phone cable extension from the jack to the DSL modem should not be more than 10 feet. I changed this last night but it hasn’t affected my connection speed. Aliant also recommended that I use the speed test for Aliant clients which clocked me at 134 kbps and 1.02 mbps throughput – slow for their High-Speed Ultra clients.
Knowledge Work Job Evaluation
Jon Husband has been discussing the limitations of job profiles and evaluations and now has asked if our methods of inquiry for knowledge work analysis are too limited. For instance:
I suggest that Know-How today is also Know-Why, and Know-Who, and Know-Now, and Know-Where-To-Find-It, and Know-When, and Know-What-If. and Know-Yourself and a wide range of contextually-defined combinations of these components of pertinent and useful information and knowledge.
Similar themes appear in books like Emotional Intelligence , Social Intelligence , Career Intelligence and A Whole New Mind. The last book can perhaps explain the current state of job analysis as it is very much a “left brain” discipline. My experience with job evaluations is that they are hoops to be jumped through and few people really pay attention to them on the job.
If job analysis/evaluation was critical to business success then all small businesses would embrace them. What works for small businesses are that relationships are personal. When the organisation becomes larger and impersonal you use a formal job classification system. When I was in the military I found the job classification and evaluation system quite inflexible and it even led to bad operational decisions. I’m not sure what the answer is, but it’s not trying to pigeon-hole everyone in a job profile. The effort put into job evaluation could instead go into targeting barriers to work performance, such as the process shown here: Analysing Performance at Work.
Drupal versus WebCT
Charlie Lowe asked his students, experienced with WebCT, how they felt about Drupal. The comments from the Business Writing course are anecdotal but sometimes a personal view is better than some dry statistcs.
The comments are generally more positive for Drupal but there are specific cases where WebCT seems to be a better tool, such as access to marks and grades.