The Return of Anti-Spam
I was curious to know two things: 1) Did my anti-spam plugin block legitimate comments? and 2) How many spam comments were actually being left? To do this, I had to delete the Anti-spam plugin from my WordPress install, and wait to see what happened.
Except for sporadic comments from “The Oldest Rater”, there aren’t any comments. There may be one every six months from some rando in Europe, but it’s not like there’s really a whole lot to say about any given joke. Still, it’s a nice feature to have on any blog-style website in case the visitor just needs to get something off their chest.
Of course it really means a lot to me when anyone interacts with the site. Visit a page, click a star, leave a comment, hack the databa- wait… don’t do that last one. When people interact with the site, it gives the site a deeper meaning. But if not, well, I can live with that too.
As for how many spams… Well at first there weren’t very many at all, but just this past week there was a serious uptick. My e-mail started bleeping several times a day requesting moderation because a comment included a URL.
delete…
delete…
delete…
delete…
delete…
Awww fuckit! Just reinstall the damn anti-spam already.
And that was that.
LMDE 3 Random Freeze-ups
So topic #2 has to do with my recent installation of LMDE 3. Full disclosure, I had this problem on this computer back when I first got it and installed LMDE 2. The thing is, the freeze-ups were weekly to monthly, and got less frequent over time. With LMDE 3, this was daily! Something had to be done.
Fortunately Google came through on the first try. It has to do with disabling the CPU power saving states:
First you have to edit Grub
sudo pluma /etc/default/grub
Next you have to add this line to the end of the file:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="intel_idle.max_cstate=1"
Finally, update Grub before doing a reboot:
sudo update-grub
Why am I telling you this? Actually, I’m not. I documenting this in case need to reinstall the OS for some reason and it starts acting up again.
Pax,
-f2x
PS: A big shout out to George and Glenn for the jokes. Thanks guys. If you would like to contribute a joke, please give our submission page a try, or just email me at flush2x@gmail.com. You can also email me to ask about getting a free* Flush Twice t-shirt! Have a great week! 🙂