More Security Issues

The Antiplanner is having a battle with someone who is hacking this blog. They are somehow signing up as a user and giving themselves administrative privileges over the site. Then they add some software which is probably spreading viruses across the Internet or something. There doesn’t appear to be any risk to users, but I’ve added more security features and, of course, deleted the phony users.

The vast majority of the 1,300 users who have signed up to make comments on this site appear to be phony, probably bots that signed up to write spam comments. The site’s spam filters prevent that, but I decided to delete a few hundred users who have suspicious email addresses. I apologize if I accidentally deleted a real user; if that happened to you, I hope you will forgive me and sign up again to submit some comments.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

12 Responses to More Security Issues

  1. Scott says:

    Seems like a typical leftist–disrupting communication, discussion & critical evaluation.

    Sure, they claim to stand for rights, to talk about stuff, as long as you agree with statism, otherwise it’s offensive, hateful, racist, fearful &/or inciteful to violence.

  2. davek says:

    I have long suspected many of the pro-planning comments left here to be phony.

  3. Dan says:

    Git ’em, Randal.

    Dan

  4. msetty says:

    Randal:

    I had the same problem last year with an unrelated WordPress blog. After getting robot-generated “users” this time from Russia, I finally shut off the ability to register completely. I would have kept comments going, but I couldn’t get the site to update to the latest version of WordPress.

    Your solution may be to install an add-on that requires humans to type in letters/numbers embedded in a graphic, to thwart the spambots. I’m not sure of any other solutions to your problem.

  5. mattb02 says:

    I have long suspected Highwayman is a bot. Hopefully in the next version of Highwayman-bot the coder will be able to introduce intelligence. And the ability to do italics in html.

  6. Frank says:

    lol@#5

    You beat me to it, matt.

  7. metrosucks says:

    It does seem that Highwayman’s single purpose is to insert inane, utterly unrelated blabber in any conversation about land use or planning. Quite single-minded in its purpose.

  8. the highwayman says:

    Look, there is a need for urban planning, but NOT for micromanaging every single thing.

  9. bennett says:

    I’m thinking that the quality of conversation on this blog is so awesome that it’s melting servers all over the world 😉

  10. metrosucks says:

    Look, there is a need for urban planning, but NOT for micromanaging every single thing.

    Then who’s going to pay for the street in front of my house if the government doesn’t micromanage everything? LMAO

  11. mattb02 says:

    Can’t wait for the next version of Highwaybot.

  12. metrosucks says:

    Matt, I think he’s written in the old Marx ++ code; they’d need to re-write the whole thing in Alinksi/Keynes Professional 2010!

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