While I have not been writing many posts here, I have been keeping up with the behind the scenes maintenance stuff. Keeping WordPress updated, dealing with spam buildup, updating plugins, dealing with spam buildup, updating themes, dealing with spam buildup, figuring out how to run PHP5 on this blog, and finally, dealing with spam buildup.

Spam, Spam, Spam & More Spam

As hard is it is to believe, most of the time I spent on behind the scenes stuff was dealing with spam. Akismet does a great job filtering it, with only a few pieces getting into the actual comments section, but on occasion, some real comments get sucked into the spam section. Since I get so few real comments here, I hate to just delete those, but that means at least looking at all of the spam that was sorted out.

This doesn’t sound too bad, but if I did not do it for a week, I could easily end up with a couple of hundred messages to look through. There were times I was getting 60+ spam a day in the spam section. Doing searches of obvious spam terms, like certain drug names, and doing a mass delete of the results made it somewhat easier, but still time consuming and not at all fun. (One of the things they do not tell you about when sharing “The Joys of Blog Writing”.) So I finally decided to check out the plugins and see what was available to cut down my numbers.

I was not looking for a spam filter. Akismet does a fine job at that. I wanted something that would catch a known spam IP address and prevent it from even reaching Akismet. I had faith that WordPress plugin writers would have something to address the issue. And my faith was rewarded in the best way. I not only found what I was looking for, I was lead to something greater than I knew existed.

Blocking IPs

Clicking on the spam link on Add New under Plugins will get you a lot of results. A lot of it is probably quite useful, like the various CAPTCHA plugins for comments and contact forms. But I was looking for something that could filter based on IP addresses and preferably was fairly automatic. Fortunately, one of the first plugins I noticed was AVH First Defense Against Spam which mentioned that it used 2 outside services for checking IPs. That was much more appealing than the ones that required my building my own blacklist or having to manually update a provided blacklist.

The installation from the WordPress site worked fine, which is always nice, and it added a separate menu under the regular dashboard menu. The new menu includes an Overview, General Options, 3rd Party Options, and a FAQ page.

The Overview page is not very useful at first. It provides information about stopped spam and some of the settings you use. The place to start is the General Options, which has 5 windows that require some kind of decisions from you.

Most of the settings are easy to understand. Do you or don’t you want to receive and email from the plugin when it runs its daily cron jobs? If you don’t know or care what that means, leave it unchecked and ignore it. Use IP caching or not? If you have a high traffic site, probably a good idea, but again, a simple check in the box to make it happen or not. Do you want to receive an email if a comment fails the security checks? If you want to see it in action, check the box, if you want to set it & forget it, leave it empty.

The two most important parts of the General Options are the Blacklist and the Whitelist. One of the reasons I picked this plugin was the use of outside sources that didn’t require me to set up a local blacklist. And the use of both of these lists is entirely optional. You don’t want to mess with them, uncheck 2 boxes and ignore them. I personally would recommend at least using the Whitelist, to list various search engine IP addresses, but it is not really necessary. I do not know of any search engines that have been blocked from my site by the plugin.

The 3rd Party Options page is where the really important stuff needs to be decided. Under the Stop Forum Spam window, you need to check the top box. That is the minimum requirement for using the plugin successfully. If you don’t want to bother with anything else, check that box, set the number in the email threshold under it to -1, save the settings and move on to other stuff.

What I would recommend, even if you do not want to get any emails from the plugin, is to go a bit farther. One of the options in that window is using an API key from the Stop Forum Spam website. This requires signing up at the website, but that is painless and quick. And doing so give you a way to pay back and improve the service.

When you have an API key, an option is added to anything on the Spam section of your comments. (Yes, you will still get some spam. None of the plugins I looked at say anything about stopping all spam, most say they will not do so. C’est la vie.) You are able to Report & Delete the message with one click. That is, report the IP address to the Stop Forum Spam database, so that it will show up when others check there. I have also been adding the IP to my local blacklist, so I never have to worry about it showing up again. That is not necessary, but since the local blacklist is checked before the Stop Forum Spam database, it saves me an API call on a known spammer.

The other side of the 3rd Party Options page is for dealing with Project Honeypot and their blacklist. In order to use the information from Project Honeypot, you need to join their site and get an API. This is also pretty painless and quick, and they do have a different blacklist, so it works well with the Stop Forum Spam to catch spammers. One of the things that I like about the information you can get from Project Honeypot is it includes things like whether or not an IP address is from a search engine bot. This allows you to easily add them into the Whitelist, making sure they do not get blocked from your site and decreasing the number of API calls you make.

Final Words

This is a very nice plugin. It scales easily with user knowledge and desires, allowing you to control everything in the set up, from emails to what databases to check.  You can set it and forget it, or be more proactive with the black and white lists. No matter how active you want to be dealing with spam, this is a good plugin to use. And just to give an idea about its value, according to the Overview page, as of this writing, 2302 spam stopped in the month of October.

This has been a pretty busy time on City of Heroes. Issue 14: Architect just came out a few weeks ago, the 5th Anniversary celebration is starting today and running through May, and also today, they put up the first announcement about Issue 15: Anniversary.

The next issue looks nice, especially for those of us that have been missing beating up the 5th Column. They are back in a big way, with a separate Strike Force and Task Force for the Villains and Heroes in the game. New costumes, new faces, new emotes, and some needed updates to the Mission Architect UI. And the best news is, it should be coming fairly quickly. With a name like Anniversary, unless they want to push it back to November, they will want it out as soon as possible so it is at least close to the 5th Anniversary.

Mission Architect Stories

The Mission Architect is surprisingly addictive. At least for me. I was not expecting to do much with it, maybe mess with it to do an origin arc for a character or 2, but that was all. Instead, while testing it during the beta, I was looking at the maps and the villain groups and got inspired. That resulted in the Future Skulls arc, ID 4727, which eventually lost the map that inspired me, but otherwise came out pretty good. Probably not Hall of Fame or Dev’s Choice, but a fairly solid story.

But that story seemed to need a followup, and I came up with a slightly different explanation for running from mission to mission. It was different enough that the first person to run it had a problem following it, and gave me some very good feedback. That resulted in Simple Times, ID 70801, being 5 missions, with more writing, but again, what seems to be a solid story from the feedback and ratings it has received.

The problem was, the ending of Simple Times finished that story, but was an obvious set up for another. This was deliberate, because I have an end for the whole thing, but I ran into a problem coming up with the start of the arc. Then I got some detailed feedback on Simple Times, which caused me to add some information to that arc, and gave me the hook to start up the next arc. So I once again find myself spending hours at the Mission Architect, putting together missions, testing maps, and trying to make sure everything makes sense when it is done.

Mission Architect Resources

One thing I hear a lot, especially in the game from people that do not spend time on the forums, is how hard it is to find good missions to run. Well there are many places to do just that, this is the Internet after all.

• COH Forums: Mission Architect: Stories & Lore – The section of the official game forums that is devoted to promoting and reviewing arcs created on the Mission Architect. Many threads where people share reviews and advice about what they think is good and bad.
• City of Heroes Mission Review – A fan run site, with a nice setup for players to review and rate arcs submitted by the arc writers. If you are a writer, put yours up and review one. This isn’t required, but more reviews make the site more useful, so more people are likely to show up and use it.
• Mission Search – Another mission review site, ran by fans. It has a very nice Advanced Search set up for finding missions. I recommend putting your arc up on both of these sites for people to find and review. Assuming of course you think it will get a good score.
• City of Heroes Architecture – Another fan run site, this one is set up for posting articles about the MA and player written reviews of arcs. Not very busy so far, but if you are a writer, it is a place to submit articles or reviews.
• CustomCoH.com – This is a place to share your custom creations, whether from single mobs to groups to entire arcs. It is not very busy, which is too bad. It has some real potential, since there is so much creative energy making new enemies and allies in the Mission Architect. Unless I get a Dev’s Choice or Hall of Fame award, my Future Skulls group can only appear in 3 missions. Sharing them with the community would mean they could be used many times.
• City of Heroes Mission Planner – If you want to work on your arc while offline, Leandro is making that possible. The Planner is not finished, but already has some nice functionality.
• Paragon Wiki>Mission Architect Tags – For arc writers and players, these tags are a very nice way to search. They are player created, so there is no real standard, but they cover most things that can be done by the MA.

So there is a quick look at the resources available if you are interested in the Mission Architect, whether as an arc writer or player. There is already more content available in the MA than the developers were able to creat in 5 years, with more coming all the time, so there should be enough to keep even the most hardcore player busy for a while.

As a wise man once said,

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.*

So the last couple of weeks have been busy. Far too busy to keep up with posting here obviously. Part of the time was spent trying to earn some money, part with family, and part with playing games. The family had games parts were much more successful than the money part so far.

Especially with the last couple of days, dealing with taxes. That has been especially depressing, but at least it is past now. Just the regular bills draining my resources at this point.

To combat the various depressing parts of the last couple of weeks, I have been spending too much time buried in City of Heroes. Issue 14 is live now, and I had to bring over and update an arc from the Test server. Feedback immediately got me started re-writing parts and searching for typos. The re-writing is done, but I do not believe it is possible to get rid of all the typos. They hide from me, just to jump out and bug the players.

Frankly, between the time spent working on a website for someone else, and writing I have been doing on my arcs for the Mission Architect, I have not had the time, nor really the inclination, to  get much written here. But I am currently between arcs on City of Heroes, and before I start on the website, I thought I would drop a quick update here.

I am also considering how, or even if, to proceed with the plugin reviews. I enjoy looking at the various offerings the plugin developers  give us, but I really need to spend more time making money, which my writing reviews will not do. Will have to wait and see how life happens I guess.

Oh yeah, if anyone that reads this is a COH player, try out Future Skulls, ID 4727, and Simple Times, ID 70801, and let me know what you think. Both are low level arcs, with related stories.

*John Lennon of course.

After letting others rate your posts and pages last time, today will be devoted to helping you rate what other people produce. These plugins are mostly for use by people that review something, whether music, TV, or movies. If that is what you do on your blog here are a couple of plugins you may find useful.

Rating Others

Xavin’s Review Ratings gives you the ability to place stars (or any other image you want to use) for things you are ratings, like music, books, etc. It uses a shortcode to place the stars in your post, and has a nice selection of options right out of the box for ratings. The defaults for the ratings can be set on the options page, including editing the output templates. Or you can override them using tags on the shortcode when desired.

Using the shortcode is very easy, just place it where you want it, using tags to set the number of stars, how they are displayed, etc. The documentation on the website is nicely laid out, and gives easy to follow examples for most of the tags, including the only one that is close to complicated, multiple ratings for something i.e., Plot, Characters, Art, then add them into an overall score.

I like this plugin. It is simple to install and use, flexible, and has good instructions. The ability to use your own images for ratings means it will fit into any review site easily, and the grouping shortcode is useful for anyone that wants to break down their ratings.

Ratings Shorttags also uses a shortcode to place ratings where you want them in your post. It has the same flexibility of placement as any other shortcode, but it is really flexible in what you can use for ratings.

On the settings page for the plugin, you can input the HTML for the Unicode symbol you want to use, the color of both the filled and unfilled symbols, and the total number of symbols that will show up.  To rate something, you just add the shortcode with the number of symbols you want filled. Using the Unicode symbols means you have a huge variety of symbols available for your reviews, but it is also one of the shortcomings of the plugin.

Because the Unicode symbols are text, they are affected by any settings that affect your text styling. This means they can rather difficult to see sometimes. This can be overcome by some CSS styling, but it is a bit annoying. Another problem with using Unicode is that anyone who visits your page that does not have the proper font installed, will not see what you want them too. The developer does have some CSS on the website that you can use to display images instead of the Unicode symbols, if you are comfortable working with CSS.

A lot of flexibility with this plugin right after installation. There is even more if you are willing to do some additional work with it and your stylesheets. In some ways it is more flexible than Xavin’s plugin, in others it is less so. You can set it up for rating multiple aspects of something, but it is not as easy as the Xavin plugin and it will not determine the overall rating automatically. But a decent option if it fills a need you have on your site.

Final Words

If you are wanting to share your feelings about something on your blog, both of these will do what you want, in slightly different ways. I admit to a preference for the Xavin plugin, but not for any really rational reason. The Ratings Shorttags plugin would function just as well, but I do not think I need the kinds of flexibility it has. It may very well give you exactly what you need.

What neither of these plugins will do is make your reviews entertaining or insightful. If you want to become the next Rotten Tomatoes, that will be up to you and your ability to write.