Revisiting design and spam
Another day, another redesign
As hinted in a previous post, my design fingers have been getting itchy. As it's been over 2 months since the last scenary change, I've decided that the time is ripe for a revamp. Let's give a warm welcome to the Black Gold theme.
A live redesign is in progress but, as ever, feedback and comments are, as ever, welcome. Don't forget to take a look at the slightly bling front page.
And I set off to vanquish the hydra
A few days ago and on the advice of a few wiser heads, I decided to install and activate an anti-spam plugin by the name of Bad Behavio(u)r. The way this program works is that it analyses the incoming requests and stops spam before they've even arrived.
And so, I installed the program and gave it a quick test. No false positives, I can still comment so good news (btw, if you're having problem, could you email me as I would be otherwise unaware).
The hydra grows back a head
In the few days after the plugin was live, something strange occured. The number of comment spam hitting my site had gone up considerably and was not at all, what I had expected. Coincidence? In this instance, I believe it to so. As mentioned, higher profile sites than this little thing are using the plugin with no ill effect. So what could account for the rise in spam.
Smarter spamming?
I announced the use of an antispam measure with a public post. Could it be that spammers are searching for keywords which would be indicative of vulnerable sites? Sounds reasonable and if this would be the case, then if one spam got through, then this would be like the smell of honey to bears. The spam noise would increase and we'd see more potential hits. This could be a factor in why we often see sudden spam floods. What this means, of course, is that you should immediately prune your site of any comment spam.
As an experiment, what could be done to test this would be to make a post and then add a load of spam comments to it so as to see if the spam rate then subsequently goes up.
Bad luck?
Human beings dislike coincidences, but it's highly likely that this is what happened here. As the majority of spam would probably be driven by scripts, then it may have just been the case that a spammer decided that this week is a good time to run his bot and piss on the world.
Update: It seems that other people have noticed that spam traffic is on the increase.
This would probably also explain the flood of spam. Comment spam is highly dependent on quantity. The minute a piece of spam gets through, the script would be likely to make the use of this vulnerable time and pollute the whole site whilst it can.
It'd be interesting to see if we can try to map the rate of spam incidences, a weather report of spam as it were. What we could do is write a plugin that would ping a centralised source whenever the number of daily comment attempts is greater than a site specific threshold. The centralised source could use this information to see if today is a bad day for spam.
Thoughts and feedback
So any thoughts on the redesign or the spam issue? BTW, after first writing this post, just before I pressed submit, I clicked the back button on my mouse:-( Needless to say, I was not very happy at all to be greeted with the blank textarea.
-30-
I do like the way you have separated out current content, with older content in a whole new div. That’s pretty cool. Very clean design, which is certainly easy to read and navigate.
As for the spam? I’ve noticed a recent increase in the amount of attempts as well. It’s quite plausible that they are searching for ‘weak spots’ but would prefer to go with a simple gut feeling.
Evolution. Just as bloggers evolve layouts, try new designs and seek better ways to do things, so will the humble spammer. We get smarter through attempting new design goals, they get smarter by exploiting new found weaknesses and methods. Someone will discover a better approach at stopping unwanted comments, then their ‘evil’ counterpart will find a way to side step it, or exploit it.
Welcome to the inkernet. :)
And that’s probably the root of the whole situation. As long as there is an incentive to evolve, the constant increase in militarisation of both side would only get worse.
BTW, thanks for the feedback on the design:-)
It looks great. Just thought I’d point out a typo - it says “Add to the discusstion“
it says “Add to the discusstion”
Good catch, thanks. How did that one slip through?
This is so beautiful, yet refreshing and new. It’s not a classic layout, which is definately a good thing in this case :)
I especially like the fact the fonts aren’t so small anymore for comments :P
Wow, this is a beautiful design. Great work! it just looks so clean and easy on the eyes. :)
As always, great work. Looks beautiful :)
Your users are extremely unlikely to have trouble with accessing your site. I’ve put a lot of attention and work into ensuring that Bad Behavior doesn’t block out humans, and it’s been weeks since I’ve received a report of a user being blocked by Bad Behaviour (versions prior to 1.1 asked users to contact me; now they ask users to contact the blog admin using a munged email address) despite countless installations.
I just watched a four-day-long referrer spam attack, in real time, of which it appears 100% was blocked by Bad Behavior. Comment/trackback spam has been up as well, but unless you were paying attention, it is very unlikely a Bad Behaviour user will notice.
Oh, by the way, you might want to consider revisiting nofollow.
I really like this. I like the colours, and I like the fact that the comments are more legible now. :). Just a quick point on the actual comment box, seems that the little text on the side of the info is a bit jacked up higher check it out in FF.
Liking the separation of current post over previous posts, and I now feel more inspired to complete my redesign. I’d possibly try and pull more of the “brown” from the lower area into the top area, but aside from that I think it’s ace. Good job.
Is it compliant?
Nice, very nice. I really like the colors but I personally do not like the strict separation of content and navigation…
I do have problems in Safari. When my mouse goes over the text the whole text of the website is underlined!
By the way, will you release Cobalt for public use?
Thanks again guys for the kind words.
“… seems that the little text on the side of the info is a bit jacked up higher
Thanks for that. Hopefully fixed now.
“Is it compliant?”
As far as the W3C validator is concerned, it all seems good. Haven’t had time to give it a proper once over though.
“When my mouse goes over the text the whole text of the website is underlined!”
That’s not very good at all, is it?:-) I guess site testing can be added to my long list of reasons to get a mac. Need to start saving up those pennies…
“By the way, will you release Cobalt for public use?”
It needs a bit of tidying up before it’ll be close to ready for public consumption. If only I didn’t have the day job to worry about…
Ever going to release this design? I like it.
What I wrote when submitting to a CSS galleries:
Thanks Marko! Unexpected but highly welcome.
Looks really nice Phu. I like the colors a lot. Keep up the good design work.
As far as Bad Behavior goes, I have not had a single spam actually get through since installing it. I have been very pleased with io_errors work on the plug-in and it only promises to get better IMO. I’d like to hear if you are still experiencing weirdness with it though.
I love this look, Phu.
Very nice and decent design, I too liked the segregation between current post and old posts…
The colors are also very well choosen so that it doesnt hurt the eyes at all..
Good Work :)
Deep
Awsome Theme, loving every bit of it.