Yesterday I was doing some shopping in Paris when I came across the following advertising sign:

(sorry for the very low quality of the picture; it has been taken with my cellphone as I didn't think I'll encounter such a "thing" to photograph ! I'll take one with a real digital camera ASAP...)

As you can see (circled in red), the owner of the shop (or his electrician or ...) removed the insulation layer from the mains cable coming out from the wall and from the two bare wires coming out from the electric sign, twisted the cables two by two, and isolated his ugly twisting with scotch tape...

No need to say that it is a very dangerous installation and that it is against the most basic safety rules !

As you may have noticed, I didn't post on this blog for a few weeks, because I am having a hard working period at school...

This evening I looked at the DIY directory to see if everything was fine and to my surprise I found more than 400+ trackbacks in one of my posts... all from spammer's websites.

What is funny is that these spammers do not even know that they are having a hard time making bots that posts on blog for... nothing. DotClear, the blog engine that I use, automatically append a special invisible tag to every link posted by the users: the rel="nofollow" tag. This tag prevent the search engines to use the link in their rank calculation algorithm. For more informations, see the post about how to prevent comment spam at the official Google blog.

I was able to implement some preventing systems in the DIY directory blog engine thanks to the informations provided in several blogs (in French - sorry):

• Antispam pour DotClear (rétroliens) from Sacha
• Un antispam pour Dotclear

Thanks to these small modifications, most of the spams will be filtered out (at least for some weeks...), and user experience is not modified, i.e. you won't have to deal with unreadable CAPTCHAs to post a simple comment.

UPDATE (June, 18th 2006): A few days ago I made a modification to Sacha's script allowing blog owners to be notified when a trackback is notified. My modification has been included in his script and is currenctly being tested here.