Don’t call me DOM

As many others, I’ve recently been receiving plenty of spammy comments on my blog; all of these are queued for moderation by default, but even that get a bit painful when flooded with moderation messages in my inbox, and having to delete individually each message. Even the bulk delete command in Wordpress doesn’t allow you to delete all (or most of) the comments at once.

I got around the moderation flood in my inbox using yet another procmail rule, and got around the second part using a small bookmarklet, which runs the following javascript code:

I have been busy lately deploying a tool that I (and others) had started to develop one year ago, and had been stalled since then, informally called Annospam; the tool allows to cleanse W3C Mailing List Archives from its huge number of spams they host and are likely to continue to receive, however clever our anti-spams systems are getting.

The idea is to use the Annotea protocol as a way to store and retrieve spam marks on archived messages, and to regenerate the relevant archives based on these marks; it uses lots of W3C Technologies (XSLT as a way to build a user interface, RDF/XML as a data format, HTTP as a query/update protocol), which makes it really interesting, if sometimes somewhat challenging.

Spammers, like many people down here, needs to rest after all their efforts; spammers needs to take a week-end break, too, as shows the repartion of the number of messages per weekday:

(1 is Monday, 7 Sunday) These plots are based on the spam I received in the past 2 months.

Note that in fact, this interpretation is probably buggy; for instance, it’s likely that a fair number of Zombies computers used to send spams are shut down during the week-end.