Political Penguin

Regular readers may have noticed an addition to the main menu of the site entitled ‘.htaccess project’. I only mention this because yesterday I was contacted by someone inquiring about it so I thought I better clarify what it’s all about.

The genesis of it came in relation to a problem brought up by fellow blogger Tyger who was having problems with the quantity of scummy spammers over at his site. Most bloggers will have come across the problem of spam but it affects us all in different ways. For some it’s just an annoyance or a waste of our time going through the reams of rubbish, adverts for pharmaceuticals, trackback spam or annoying little people who tell us how nice our site is while embedding a link back to teenage girls with big knockers.

I gave Tyger a basic crash course in some of the wonders of the use of the .htaccess file and out of that came the idea that a collaborative approach could yield results.

I won’t go into detail in this post as that will come when the project gets up and running but it’s aimed at bloggers who have a certain setup to their site. It is NOT aimed at bloggers who use free hosted systems. Things such as sites that end in .blogspot.com or .wordpress.com. It’s aimed at bloggers who have gone to the expense of getting their own hosting package and URL who have access to their files on that server via FTP. If you have your own hosting, this will almost certainly be the case and don’t worry I will get round to doing easy to follow instructions for the whole process.

Who’s this aimed at? Well, in the process of scooting around I had a chat with Zeth Green who suggested what would be a superior methodology to achieve the same result but would have resulted in a need to programme specific plugins for various platforms for which neither I nor anyone else I know with the requisite tech knowledge would have time to do. This project is primarily aimed at those who don’t necessarily have oodles of tech knowledge (so most political bloggers) but it does have the advantage of being cross-platform so if you use WordPress, Movable Type, B2Evolution, Drupal or even Blogger systems, if you’ve got your own hosting then it will work.

What’s the point of the project?

Whatever blogging system you use almost all have some form of spam filtering techniques. Where they all fall down though is that they operate within the site. So by the time they do their stuff the naughty little spamming bots have been half way round your site interacting with it, attempting to place comments and this wastes bandwidth, not to mention computational power slowing sites down for real users.

What we want to do is stop them getting that far by using the .htaccess file which almost everyone will have to stop these spambots from getting onto the site in the first place. After all, bandwidth is what those of us who have hosting packages pay for, it’s money and why should we allow it to be eaten up by these obnoxious little urchins peddling their crap.

What it will amount to is an easy cut and paste list of ‘bad naughty evil IP addresses’ where known spam comes from that can be popped into a .htaccess file with the simple use of a text editor which everyone has and the use of an FTP client that is freely available to all. Tyger has already said he’s up for the project for which you may have noticed the addition of a login form on the site. This will be to allow those who want to contribute to sign into the site and add content. If however anyone else would like to be a contributor, feel free to let me know in the contact section. This is a distinctly non-partisan project so even if you’re a Tory or dare I say it, a LibDem then if you’re interested in contributing something back to the blogging community then drop me a line.