Author: Richard

Stopping the Leechers

| Richard

I was looking at the traffic for some of my sites the other day and spotted a lot of bandwidth (relatively) being used by one particular site. Now that site only really serves up a script to convert RSS feeds to JavaScript files so that I can them embed news items from selected sources into some client sites.

So I looked at the web stats. for that site and discovered that nearly all the traffic was coming from a site in China. I followed a couple of the referring links and found that the pages were basically just generating page after page of potential search terms with embedded news feeds presumably to serve ads. on those pages.

That does beg the question that if they are intelligent to code those pages or that system, why aren’t they intelligent enough to simply add the scripts to their own site and serve them from there?

Now my site is hosted on a regular Linux box running Apache Web Server, so it was a fairly straightforward task to simply block all traffic from that domain name using an .htaccess file with this code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?baddomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

So the next day when I checked the stats., there were many thousands of Failed Referrer entries where the code was no longer being leeched by them. Job done!

But it did then appear that my site had some particular attraction to them because they then started running the scripts on a different domain! Now, my first thought was to simply amend the .htaccess file to read as follows:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?baddomain\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?anotherbadone\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

But I realised I could end up playing cat and mouse with them for life, so instead I have now set the .htaccess file to only allow specific referring domains access to the scripts by using this code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?gooddomain\.co\.uk [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?anothergoodone\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

By adding the “!”, the expression now says “if the referrer is not gooddomain, then…”. The only difficulty for me then is making sure there are matching entries for all the legitimate referrers (trickier as one of the sites has multiple domain names).

We’ll see how we get on with this.

[edited to add]

And lo and behold! The blocking is working well, especially as the Leecher in question, hosted by NetEase.com, Inc., has now started doing it with a third domain name.

Re-arranging Deckchairs on the Titanic

| Richard

aka The ezboard Shuffle

It starts! Regular ezboard users will be aware of the ol’ ezboard shuffle: people complain about the slow speed of their ezboard and it gets shifted to a different server until that server slows right down and then boards are moved again, etc. ad infinitum.

So I suppose that the news that they’ve started doing this on Yuku already - and remember, kids, it’s still not finally released yet - should come as no surprise really. After all, they’ve been reeeeeaaaally slow over there for ages now, blaming users and indeed search engines for the treacle-like performance.

Hey ezboard! Here’s a thought: how about getting some servers and more connectivity instead? Oh yes, that would mean spending money…

More e-mail Entertainment

| Richard

Or “Dear Lazyweb…” 

Someone from a large firm of property professionals visited one of my web sites today and filled in the feedback form under our contact details:

“I am working on behalf of … at … in Aberdeen. I was wondering if you could send confirmation of your contact details, such as your e-mail address. Thank you.”

“Hmm,” I wondered, “what can this be about?”

So I asked:

“Can we ask for what purpose?”

Now you’ll have already spotted the slight flaw in my plan, given I e-mailed them back (and included telephone details in the signature).

Nevertheless, a reply came my way:

“Hi Richard,

… was attempting to contact Nikki through this e-mail address
Nikki.{Lastname}@{afirmofarchitects}.co.uk but the e-mail bounced back. I am not sure what it was regarding but I can find out for you tomorrow as I believe he has been in meetings all day.

Thanks for your help…”

Who?

Anyway, I had a spare five minutes:

“Hi Emma,

Well I suppose contacting people at random from the Internet is one way of trying to get someone’s contact details.

I have no idea who Nikki might be but amazingly enough through skilful use of Google and the search string “Nikki {Lastname}” (cunningly gleaned from the bouncing e-mail address you had, and coupled with the possibility that she might be an architect from that address, I was able to find http://www.{adifferentarchitects}.co.uk/ and the e-mail address nikki.{lastname}@{adifferentarchitects}.co.uk

Stand in awe of my mastery of the Internet!

All the best,

Richard”

The Last Laugh

| Richard

Toy Yoda

My inital reaction was to laugh out loud at this woman who should have listened more carefully to what was on offer in what was apparently an April Fool’s Day prank.

But this is from America where they have loads of ambulance-chasing lawyers and where the Courts are open to the most bizarre and spurious claims (which only tends to reinforce the ‘only in America’ stereotype). So of course the company has settled out of Court with her…

Ideal Customer Profile

| Richard

You know, it is really sad sometimes.

I was trawling through the wreckage that is Yuku’s Support [sic] forum this morning and came across a worried ezboard Gold Community owner asking about migrating to Yuku. What caught my eye was this:

“We just paid our Gold Community for the next year (it was about $1,200 for the year). We’re really active and growing daily, and we hope to grow further.”

And the customer’s self-summation also caught my eye:

“I’m not a computer person, and don’t understand much of the lingo that’s kicked around these owner/administrator discussion areas.”

And that is the perfect customer for ezboard, Inc.

Why?

Well I tracked down their ezboard Community, PaleoPlanet, and had a quick look at their community chest. They had indeed recently paid a whopping $1,121 for a year’s Gold Community and indeed the board owner had topped it up by $121 just before renewal and there’s presently $412 sitting there that they would never get back if they chose to leave ezboard even if it is unspent funds.

Their daily posts statistics are similar to our self-hosted vBulletin board. The difference, though, is that our board doesn’t have mimits on how many pages of threads there are. Oh there’s also the slight difference in hosting costs: ours is around 10% of theirs and of course there’s no comparison between the features our members enjoy and those theirs endure.

So if any of their members reads this, do yourselves a favour and go to DreamHost instead and sign up for what is basically an unlimited hosting plan (in real terms) with none of that 20 page maximum nonsense at ezboard.

And if you use the promotional code EZSAVE50 you can even get $50 off your first year’s hosting. Go on! Give it a try!

More on that Smooth Yuku Code Push

| Richard

Remember how “Silent” Rob Labatt finally broke cover to thank his remaining staff for a “fantastically smooth release” when they ‘pushed’ yet another Yuku update?

Well, amongst other things:

Well if that’s a “fantasically smooth release”, I’d hate to see a bad one. Still, this is Yuku/ezboard, I suppose…

Yuku Breaking Yuku Rules

| Richard

From the “Do As I Say, Not As I Do” department comes news that ezboard, Inc. staff are impersonating their customers by sending out messages apparently from community administrators:

“From: {board Admin}
To: {user}

{boardname} has moved to Yuku!

Please check it out here!

This was a community message from {board Admin} on {boardname}.

{board Admin’s signature}”

Now I can understand it if the Board Admins. themselves want to send out a global announcement to their members, but this was not one of those messages. As the aggrieved board admin. writes:

“I don’t like being impersonated, even if the reason is benign”

Of course, a quick look at the Yuku ToU shows that impersonating another Yuku user (or indeed another person) is forbidden.

So ezboard, Inc. are impersonating a Yuku user by sending out these faked messages and as we’ve already seen, they also pretended to be celebrities by setting up Yuku profiles in a pathetic attempt to attract traffic to their display ads.

What a nice bunch of people.

Vodafone Content Filter

| Richard

Now it’s all very laudable with the widespread availability of 3G mobiles to minors for Vodafone to be forced - they say - to restrict access to dodgy content. But where it all falls down is when their system falls over and remains down for days on end (as it is now) so they cannot check whether content is blocked by default or, as is the case with me, allowed.

Oh and when Vodafone refers to adult content, this includes sites like Photobucket…