Holy crap make the spam stop

So I guess now that this site has started to get a little traffic for some unknown reason, it’s climbing up a few charts and search engines… and a few spam bot lists too. Over the past 15 days, I’ve probably gotten over 10 emails day with spam bot comments. I guess over the next week or two I’ll be testing some of the anti-spam WordPress plugins and I’ll let y’all know which ones are worth grabbing. I’m actually using a few already including a recaptcha plugin but damned if it doesn’t stop the bots. If anyone has any recommendations, I’m all ears.

Anyway, as for actual posts related to what I’d like to converse on this site, I’ve been swamped with work and personal life but I hope to pick up speed. Ooh.. and on a sidenote, go Mississippi State Bulldogs with the big win over Vanderbilt this weekend

UPDATE: Well, I’m already using the top plugins for comment spam blocking so i decided to spend and hour or two adding words to the Spam Filter and so far so good…

UPDATE #2: Although I’ve got some custom things in place, here’s an excellent post at Speckboy which gives me a few plugins to try out to get ahead of the spammers.

Another good benefit of using Application Name in a connection string

I’ve seen a plethora of posts like this one which mention the benefits of using “Application Name” in your connection string. I thought I’d add on to this another neat item that people could use. While it isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel, the technique is commonly forgotten about. We use it in WayPoint since it can run multiple imports into a CaseLogistix library (SQL database) at the same time.

So, first we add the “Application Name” to the SQL connection string but we append a GUID to the end of it (to make sure it’s unique). Then, if our application needs to be aware of multiple instances connected to the same SQL database, we simply run this query:

select count(*) from master.dbo.sysprocesses JOIN master.dbo.sysdatabases ON 
master.dbo.sysprocesses.dbid = master.dbo.sysdatabases.dbid 
where IsNull(program_name, '') <> '' 
AND program_name like 'WayPoint-%' 
AND program_name <> 'WayPoint-<%% Our current GUID here %%>' 
AND master.dbo.sysdatabases.name = '<%% Our current database name %%>'

This tells us the count of processes of other WayPoints running. Even better, we can dive further into this query to get info about the other processes and even kill them off if needed or do whatever with them. Not rocket science but a good thing to have in your back pocket if you need it.