So hey, kids, I'm still alive, and now posting from the lovely Caribbean island of Puerto Rico for the foreseeable future.
After the move, and after some confusion on the part of the cable company involving losing my order, I have blessed, blessed broadband again, without having to cadge the neighbors' WiFi from the rooftop terrace, which would be a great place to work were it not for the tropical proximity of a horrible huge ball of blazing nuclear explosion hanging over my head, plus the necessity of placing the laptop in a precarious position on the railing, four floors above concrete, to get good signal.
But now things are good again, and I have 9000 emails to go through (yes, as a guy with a spam filter, I should probably be filtering my spam, but, well, it's a long story and look, shiny thing!). And lo! within those 9000 mails were two from hapless forum operators who are getting fed up with manual despamming.
So sure, I'll be seeing what I can do in that regard, but it piqued my interest in forum spam again. And so I checked my logs for instances of XRumer, and wow -- somebody actually linked my XRumer blog keyword in response to ... a new instance of the XRumer forum bomb. Dated April 5, as it so happens. This one contains the novel text "Also, do you know when XRumer 4.0 Platinum Edition will be released?" and it's posted by AlexMrly. Google either the phrase or the name, and you'll see a whole lot of forum spam. Hey, XRumer guys -- thanks! What we all want is more forum spam!
Now I have that off my chest. I'm going to reiterate my offer to anybody listening -- I'm going to see what I can do to combat forum spam around the world, and I'm not charging anything for it. So far, I'm just in it for the interest, just like email spam in 1999. Get in touch. I'll be here. Well -- I might actually be at the beach. But I'll be back soon.
Sorry that this post isn't really all that programming-oriented. I hope to be making that right, in the next couple of days. Blocking XRumer is fun, and so easy even a child could do it! No, seriously: if you want to help me stop XRumer, all I need is your data.
