Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

When I sent my first email while in college in the late 80′s, we didn’t even call them such. They were “network messages“; few of us had access to the gateway that would send these messages outside of the local network and into the wild unknown. In fact, there was nothing of interest out there, until the early 90′s.

But enough with these old tales. Roll forward a couple of decades and email is as common as picking up the phone. At times, it’s faster to communicate via email than by phone, as it can be delivered through several media.

The problem is of course, spam - the sheer amount of junk email that ends up clogging your mailbox. Nowadays, there are several methods to block email spam effectively, including filters and even forwarding through Gmail that seems to catch a lot of it.

But what about comment spam on blogs?

For blogs that run WordPress, you should enable Akismet as soon as you set up your blog, although unfortunately it doesn’t keep the spammers away; the comments are sent to your spam queue along with several false positives. You still have to go through the queue to read them.

On a given day, I get 75 to almost 100 spam comments sent to the spam queue. I used to skim through them to see if anything was caught by mistake but after a while it became tedious.

So I tried installing various captcha plugins that were forcing commentators to enter a jumbled up code into a form field along with their message. Aside from being an extra inconvenience to those wanting to leave a comment, the captchas were cracked in 3 days by various spambots peddling cheap pharmaceuticals, flooding my mailbox like wild jellyfish in an old port’s waters.

The solution?

The single most important WordPress plugin that will effectively block all spam from ever reaching the queue, is called WP-SpamFree and it works wonders. It has various parameters to do what you ask it to do; you don’t have to worry about how it does it, but it works.

Having tested WP-SpamFree at the recent traffic onslaught of DomainGang.com after a post made Digg’s homepage, the plugin logged no less than 350 spam comments that never made the spam queue. These blind spambots released their scummy digital farts into the air, never reaching the DomainGang.com database. Not a single false positive!

Download it, install it, and forget about comment spam for good. And while you’re at it, follow me on twitter http://twitter.com/acroplex

I’m a big fan of Pauly Shore.

From the era of MTV to Encino Man, Son in Law, In the Army Now to Jury Duty and the mega-flop Bio-Dome, Pauly Shore often appeared next to other up and coming Hollywood comedians.

The 40-something comedian’s career abruptly stalled in the mid 90′s.

The reason?

The Hollywood studios didn’t want to make family comedies anymore, they wanted action-packed, superhero-driven mega-movies that instead of producing safe revenues in the $25 to $40 million range, they’d be aiming for the $100+ million figures. Soon though, people would be asking for real comedy, not plastic, pre-processed “funny lines” tossed in-between punches and CGI.

Pauly Shore has a distinct style and he’s active on twitter as well. I love the guy, he kept it going despite the career downfall and since the mid 2000′s he’s been on the rebound with several funny and serious roles on the TV and the movies.

Pauly’s recent cameo appearance in Experian’s educational series about credit, titled “The Funny Truth about Credit” made me take a good look into what Experian – one of the three credit bureaus – is trying to achieve.

In this series, Experian is using famous actors in short movies, providing a humorous, entertaining and educational approach to what constitutes good credit practices. The idea is unique and the message is passed through quick, sharp dialogue that appeals both to the fans of the actors and those that want to learn more about credit and how it affects our daily lives.

With DomainGang – the only daily entertainment magazine catering to domainers – I strive to deliver humor, insight and a thought-provoking analysis of the domain industry.

When large corporations like Experian utilize humor as their promotional tool, it’s important to see this as a lesson that thinking outside the box is what is needed; regurgitating news and information is tiring and uninteresting.

Yesterday I went to Raglan Road, a posh Irish pub in the Downtown Disney area. The temperature outside hovered just above the freezing point; it was the first time ever that I didn’t feel out of place wearing a hat and gloves in Florida.

Inside the restaurant, the beautiful dancer occupied most of the central stage, while us, the patrons enjoyed our meals, ogling her moves. Fish and chips was definitely creamy and fresh, despite being served in a clean piece of cooking paper instead of the traditional newspaper. This is Disney property, after all, and sanitation is more important than tradition.

The various items on shelves, full of rich Irish culture reminded me of times that have long passed by; when deals closed with a firm handshake and a man’s word was unbreakable.

The Irish immigrants to the US were looked down upon, they had to stick to their own but once cornered, those feisty individuals wasted no time in defending their own.

On their footsteps, Greek immigrants helped build the railroads that connected the east and west through the mid-west and the plains of America, often being treated with contempt and racial discrimination for their initiative and dare to venture onto a new land that wasn’t their place of birth.

Every time someone attempts to belittle you, who speaks low of you, who due to his own failed mind attempts to bring you down, that’s the time that the gloves are off. That’s the time that you become a giant, a union of all men whose steps you’re following to achieve your life’s goals with no power other than your own.

The DomainGang.com project has been a baby of mine for the past three months. Although it was conceived long ago, sometimes it’s easy to plan and dream than to create, nourish and grow. Other times, it’s easier to be pure and full of ideals than to be wary of other people’s intentions and to carry a stick for defending yourself.

In the long run, it’s better to squash the bugs before they become roadside monsters that demand your unwilling contribution each time passers-by want to reach your entertainment establishment.

In just 90 days, DomainGang.com has achieved a Google PR3, an Alexa rating of about 43,000 and a followship that despises regurgitated news. DomainGang.com is offering the option to its readership to expand their minds, to remove their blinders and to read between the lines of the domain industry.

DomainGang LLC will be present in both TRAFFIC Las Vegas and DomainFest, in different formats. To those that are willing to see what DomainGang does, what it offers currently and what the future beholds for the domain business – see you there.

Just remember: the gloves are off.