Redirect to /dev/null

Before I tell you about this dream, I just want to celebrate how great my husband is (contrary to what my dreamself implies). I spent most of Friday trying to find a way to minimize comment spam. As I’ve mentioned, dealing with the spam takes up an increasing amount of my time, and I was a little intimidated about posting more frequently, because I feared more posts would mean even more spam to deal with. I’d have to take care of this before I could really commit to NaBloPoMo. So I spent most of Friday trying to get my blacklist plugin to drop any comments with more than four URLs on the floor. It’s an easy enough proposition, but I failed.

When my husband got home on Friday night, he hacked the php script for the blacklist and, while I was gone to yoga, made it work.

It’s beautiful to behold, folks. In the last 15 hours, I’ve blacklisted 170 spam comment messages: 45 with my old set of filters and 125 with Kurt’s modification targeting four or more URLs. That’s 125 messages that never sent me an email (I get email when comments make it to the moderation area or to the newer posts, which is how I know I’ve got to delete spam over here). 125 things I did not have to deal with in any way whatsoever. Just poof, gone, magic.

Most of you don’t use URLs in your comments, but if you do, keep it to less than four or your comment will be /dev/nulled. I’ll never see it. Isn’t life wonderful?

Now, on to the dream. I dreamed that my husband had been trying to write, but every time he needed something to write with he kept picking up my Waterman. He was so mad about it he was threatening to throw my Waterman away. It was driving him crazy. I was very upset. I kept telling him I loved my pen and it was hard to find another (they’ve stopped making the pen I like) and didn’t he remember how hard it was to find and how expensive and so forth? He had helped me, after all, placing the order and paying with paypal for me. He was unmoved : furious and determined to get rid of the thing. He didn’t want me to find another. He wanted it gone forever.

P.S. In the minutes since I wrote this entry, two more comment spams were taken care of by the “Kurt Block” hack. Yes! Feel free to dance and do appropriate fist pumping gestures.