Occasional Thoughts

You won! Be proud of yourselves, you stinkers!

I am not a big fan of blogs that moderate every single comment. This hinders active and timely discussions and can be seen as a kind of censorship. Unfortunately my blog seems to have gained the interest of spammers and since their comments seem to be manual posts, captchas do not help. During the last days I had to delete about 10 spam comments per day, while there were were just about a few comments during the last weeks. 

Since the effort to delete SPAM is higher than to accept valid comments and I really do not want to support some obscure sites just because I didn't check my mails for a few hours I decided to turn moderation on.

I promise that I will do me best to confirm any valid comments within a few hours.

At least you get easier to read captchas in return.

As I already wrote I am tired of people that use my images on their sites and consuming my bandwidth. Don't get me wrong. I always appreciate links to my site and I am pleased if you find something useful. What I don't like however is that someone refers to high resolution images as background images for his site that are meant as desktop wallpapers.

A colleague gave me the hint to block this sites by the referer through .htaccess files in the respective directories. And this works great for me:

So please.... I do not want to prohibit the use of screenshots or wallpapers from my site. You can use them free of charge. But please do not let me pay for the bandwidth you are causing. So feel free to copy the images to your server, but retain from <img> tags that refer pictures from my server. And even then it would be fair and nice to mention on your site, where you have taken them from.

All these links are pointing to the old WordPress blog, which I have obsoleted, since I got tired of the steady security fixes containing critical fixes that are obviously due to insecure coding styles (notorious SQL injection flaws says it all). Therefore I switched to Serendipity and haven't regret that. While Wordpress had numerous of security updates in the meantime, Serendipity had just one - containing a minor security flaw in a module that I do not use.

Serendipity was able to import all postings from the old WordPress blog, however links to other postings or links to images were still pointing to the old pages. So I kept the old blog running. But WordPress still suffers from more and more security flaws - that's why Google showed the warning. As far as I can judge there was no real harm, but I also do not want to keep the old blog updating.