Category: x-personal

Random and intermittent postings about life, the universe, etc..

Spam, spam, spam, spam

I’ve noticed a trend lately of spam accounts that have all started with xiaoqin, followed by a random assortment of letters. Running through all 1, 2, and 3 letter permutations led me to these valid accounts. There are too many 4 and 5 letter combinations to go searching, but I have seen them in the wild. I personally know that some of these suspended accounts were ones that I reported for spamming. Others haven’t posted anything or commented anywhere yet, but I presume they’ll be activated later.

Some observations:
* Most of the early ones had a listed location of Beijing, but further down the list they’re mostly listed as being in Flushing, NY.
* These accounts all list the same four auto-added communities. and are where I’ve seen the majority of comment spam by them. A few of them have added themselves as friends.
* When they’re spamming comments they’re typically advertising www.fullmalls.com
* They’ve all been created in the last four months or so.
* I’ve also collected a gallery of the userpics used by these accounts – I think the spammers found some pictures from some innocent person on the internet and have appropriated her pictures to make their spambots seem more human.

Continue reading Spam, spam, spam, spam

Howto: Impede logged-out users from reading your journal

Work in progress

Warning: This technique is not a guarantee. While this technique will prevent your journal from being read directly by logged out users, they can still read your public entries on the friends pages of your friends, or by using ?format=light on the end of the entry URL they were sent to. This technique is only a roadblock, not an actual stop. Do not rely on this technique to protect sensitive information.

This technique will display what looks like an LJ error page to anyone who visits your journal and is not logged in at LJ (log out and visit this entry again via this link). It gives the impression that there is a technical fault and they should try again later, but nothing will change until they log in.

Briefly:
1) Identify current layout and theme.
2) Create new theme layer.
3) Copy the contents of your current theme into the new theme layer.
4) Copy the code from the Page::print function in your current layout.
5) Paste the Page::print code from your current layout into the new code below, and then paste the entire thing into your new theme layer.
6) Edit your current style to use the new theme layer you just created.

Full instructions under the cut

How to eliminate “Share” on your journal

Work in progress.

This technique only applies if you have a paid/permanent account.

With LJ’s recent re-introduction of the Share function many people are again concerned with the un-attributed spreading of their own content. You can remove the link but it requires working with S2; you can’t remove it with CSS. Instructions for un-themed standard layouts (Smooth Sailing, Refried Paper, etc… Basically, any style where you accomplished everything through CSS instead of S2 coding.) will be at the end of this entry, with specific code replacements in the comments. If you’re already using a custom layout or theme please read on.

You need to be comfortable editing either your layout or your theme layer. If you’re not yet comfortable with that, please check out the tutorials available at , particularly Creating and Using a Theme Layer and Renaming edit and memories links.

Back already? Okay, here we go.

Spiral Knights

I’m looking forward to the full release of Spiral Knights next week. Those of us that got in the preview get a sneak peek weekend starting on Friday but I’ll be up visiting Dad so I won’t get to start right away.
There’s been a lot of press lately, and a wonderful photo album from a player who fell in love, so it’s been interesting seeing the wide world’s reaction to this little effort that I was introduced to 2 years ago as Project X. I think the feel of the world is fantastic and I really believe that Three Rings could sell this as a console game and do well with it. This game really resembles a graphical MUD more than a modern MMO and the gameplay really shines.
My only regret is that my laptop is just on the edge of being able to handle it and I can really feel a slowdown when there’s a lot of mobs on the screen, even at low graphics, but I still enjoyed what I saw enough to plunk down $4.95 for the starter package. I’m also enjoying the fact that OOO is still able to offer free play and is introducing the exchange concept into a game with wider appeal.

FaceJournal

Heh. To practice CSS and learn more about S2 I set myself a challenge: make an LJ layout that looks like Facebook. I did this in just under a week’s time and 85% was written from scratch.



Name: FaceJournal
In use: At my journal
Code: Public
To use: You need a paid account. Go to Your Styles and scroll to the bottom. Under Create Style choose a name, any name, and click create. On the next page choose your language (whatever you pick won’t make a difference) and choose other under the Layout dropdown. In the LayerID box that pops up put 27035570. You’ve now created a style using this custom layout as it’s base layer, so go back to the Style page, find your new style in the list, and select Use.
Features:

  • Logged in top navigation bar has a search bar
  • Logged-out top navigation bar includes links to log in
  • Calendar view includes links to all years of the calendar
  • Includes security icon on entry linkbar
  • Comment on an entry by clicking “like”
  • Recognizes if an entry was posted today, in the past, or is future-dated
  • Perma-link by clicking on the date
  • Includes space for one vertical ad on the right. If no ads displayed entries will spread to nearly the full width.
  • Different background color for screened comments
  • Mimics the Facebook layout as much as possible while still including all of LJ’s features.
  • English only – there’s currently no internationalization and no options for choosing your own text.
  • All styling is done with CSS so it should be pretty simple to change colors if you want to.
    Current Mood: accomplished