Update 3/3/2007: Fixed. Wordpress kindly changed several things about how templates work since my last update. More on that later.

Pogue is one of my favorite writers, and I hate to see him become the latest to take up the net’s equivalent of an Andy Rooney “kids these days” rant. I agree with Gina at Lifehacker—David couldn’t be more wrong. Here are the facts as I see them:

1. People are jerks. Not all of them, but many. What Pogue calls “online etiquette” never existed—or if it did, it was just like regular etiquette: something some of us aspire too, and others ignore and mock. People were jerks on Bulletin Board Systems in the 80s and on USENET in the 90s, and people are jerks on web forums now.

2. More people, more jerks. I’ve watched many a USENET newsgroup and web forum grow from a friendly community of 10-20 people to a semi-friendly community of 100 to a cruel, vindictive pile-on of 300 or more. It’s not that large groups can’t work—just that the larger the group, the more controls you need to keep it constructive. When a group outgrows the controls in place, it fails to be a community.

3. Anonymity isn’t the problem. While people have been arguing since the 80s about the lack of face-to-face communication sending common courtesy out the window, people in online communities have proven time and again that it doesn’t have to be that way. I’ve seen anonymous communities that work just fine, and plenty of non-anonymous ones that were overrun by jerks.

4. Maturity matters. One thing Pogue is probably correct about is that sometimes younger people have a greater tendency to be jerks than those a bit more mature. This isn’t an absolute rule, but obviously most of us become more graceful at dealing with society—online or offline—as we gain experience. Sites that have a younger audience need more controls to stay on topic. Needless to say, some younger folks are more mature than some older folks. That’s why I emphasized maturity rather than age.

5. Content inspires community. Quoting Gina’s comment at Lifehacker:

Also, netiquette in public forums has a lot to do with the content around which the community is centered. Lifehacker’s posts set out to help folks, so in kind, our readers want to help us and each other back. Digg is a popularity contest of oneupmanship. Gawker is all about making fun of things, so its readers mock each other and it right back in the comments. Karma’s a boomerang.

The secret to healthy online communities is probably some combination of social responsibility, consequences, and a feeling of community, all of which depend on the size of the site, its content, and how the community is controlled. Are there moderators? Do they deal quickly and fairly with problems? Are there automatic controls to prevent some of the more obvious problems? Or are the moderators so outnumbered that they represent a tiny voice among the thousands? When Pogue looked at digg—an explosively popular, poorly moderated “peanut gallery” where the value is in the links and their rankings, and the discussions rarely add much value—is it any wonder his worst fears were confirmed?

What Pogue has probably noticed is that, as his writing presence grew from a tiny thing read only by techies to a mass-audience phenomenon, he’s getting more and more emails and comments from jerks. It’s easy to look at this and think that people everywhere are losing their manners—as my quotation site grew from zero visitors to hundreds of thousands, I’ve had the same thoughts more than once. But now that my wife and I run several different sites, we’ve learned that the smaller ones have less jerks, and different sites attract different sorts of audiences.

Also, as I’ve run my biggest site for 12 years, I’ve seen good and bad behavior come and go in cycles. If I had to make a guess at an overall trend for today, I’d say it’s positive. At 150,000 visitors a day the site still attracts plenty of jerks, but I’ve been surprised at people’s good manners lately. Even most of the people who dislike the site are communicating it with better manners these days.

Don’t take my word for it, or David’s. Find some good communities and stay away from the bad ones. Give humanity the benefit of the doubt. If you run a site, enjoy and encourage the valuable comments from visitors and ignore the jerks. I for one will wait until I’m a bit older before I start ranting about how much nicer people were in “the old days.”

• See also: Endless September (Wikipedia)—a reminder of another of the many occasions when online etiquette was declared dead.

[via Lifehacker]

To avoid hundreds of spam trackbacks a day—which cannot be reliably filtered, period, no matter what anyone says—I don’t allow trackbacks on any of my sites.

Meanwhile, Technorati has released a link count widget for weblogs. This is a very easy way to include a link that displays “blog reactions,” or posts elsewhere linking to the current post. You can see it at the bottom of this post next to the “Comments” link.

This is an ideal replacement for trackbacks—it keeps the links at Technorati, which has professionals to deal with spam, rather than on my sites, and it serves the purposes of enabling discussion across weblogs and enabling weblog authors to brag about how many links they’re getting. It would be perfect if not for two flaws:

• If there are no links to a post, it displays a generic “View blog reactions” link, which appears not to be customizable. This is unfortunate for those of us who have less popular weblogs, since the link is usually useless. I’d much rather have the link disappear until there’s a “reaction” to link to.
• Technorati’s database is a jumbled, inconsistent mess that cannot be counted upon to reliably report links. That’s a topic for another day, though, and I’m hopeful that they’ll improve with time.

Despite these issues, it’s still better than Trackback. Goodbye, Trackback, and good riddance.

I had my first experience with exposure on Digg the other day when my article on The Gadgets Page, 10 ways to make your digital photos last forever, hit their front page. Here’s a bit of analysis of the impact it had on the site.

You can see in the graph above that The Gadgets Page previously had about 900-1000 visitors a day. We hit the Digg front page at 10:30PM on Tuesday, August 15th. We had nearly 7000 visitors by the end of Tuesday and a whopping 30,949 visitors on Wednesday. Traffic tapered off after that, but we’re still seeing more visitors than we used to: 2196 on a normally quiet Sunday, and 2430 (not shown in graph) on Monday the 21st.

The impact on our server was minimal. I assume a Digg at 10:30PM has a less dramatic effect than one in the middle of the day. Our server is built to handle the insane traffic of The Quotations Page so it was only subjected to about a 40% increase in traffic Tuesday night.

Here’s a look at the various links we gained and how many visitors they sent us:

• Digg: We hit the front page at about 50 diggs, and quickly rose to 600 or so. Now there are 1880 diggs total. Since the incident, we’ve had 27,699 total referrals from digg.com.
• Problogger: Darren’s group writing project was our first link and probably led to the Digg attention. We only had 39 visitors directly from Problogger, but there were definitely some influential types among them.
• CNET: They linked to us in this post, probably after seeing it on Digg. 3559 total visitors.
• del.icio.us: Bookmarked by 272 users, and a brief appearance on the Popular page. 2014 total visitors from del.icio.us.
• Lifehacker: We appeared in this post shortly after the digg. (I had submitted the link to them, as had Darren at Problogger.) We had 2368 total visitors from Lifehacker.
• Other links: According to Technorati, we have 77 new links from weblogs to that article, bringing our total number of links to 143—in other words, we gained more links from this single incident than from the last year of regular posting. Along with the ones mentioned above, highlights included links from BBSpot (961 visitors) and MSNBC (465 visitors).
• Ad revenue: About $20. Sudden spikes in traffic are not very profitable.

As I’ve seen others mention, Digg sends you a storm of traffic that quickly dissipates. However, I was pleasantly surprised at how many permanent links we gained in the process, and it looks like our number of regular readers has more than doubled. I look forward to more fun with Digg in the future.

At any rate, the folks at Bloglines have come up with a solution to the problem. You can now claim feeds in a process similar to Technorati’s. Once claimed, you can mark all but one of the feeds as duplicates, so that only your One True Feed is listed when people try to subscribe.

Two caveats:

• The feed you choose as “Not a duplicate” must be the first one Bloglines lists for the site. Otherwise, it won’t list ANY feeds when someone uses their bookmarklet to subscribe. I’ve verified this on two of my weblogs, but it may not be consistent, so some testing is called for.
• I’m not sure what happens when existing subscribers are subscribed to a feed you mark as a duplicate. In one case, I was still subscribed to an empty feed, and in another, the feed disappeared from my subscriptions. Proceed with caution if you have lots of subscribers.

Aside from that, it works well. You can also edit your feed’s description, image, and favicon for use on Bloglines, and specify whether the feed will show up in searches. Nice work!

[via Lifehacker]

I’ll update this today with some actual detail about what I’m seeing here, hopefully.

If you answered jhQH4f, you’re wrong. jnQH4f? Wrong. jhQ44f? JhQA4f? Also wrong… at least according to the forum that required me to enter the correct code to prove that I’m not an evil spam-generating hacker robot. Apparently I’m more of a robot than I thought, because I have no idea what that fourth glyph is. I tried about 5 other combinations before giving up and reloading the page a couple of times until I found one I could read.

This is, of course, a CAPTCHA test, something that has lately joined spam, pop-up ads, browser bugs, and people who use the word “blogosphere” on my list of Things That Annoy Me About the Web. It’s supposed to prevent spammer scripts from registering, but I’m guessing tests this difficult prevent a good number of honest-to-goodness humans from accessing sites.

Coincidentally, a few minutes before running into this, I read Seth Godin’s post about running into the same problem at Ticketmaster’s site. At least I’m not alone.

Attention webmasters: If you want users to sign up, please don’t use a CAPTCHA system in your site unless it’s really easy for ordinary people to read without pulling the graphic into Photoshop for sharpening and enlargement. If you don’t want users to sign up, you could just remove the registration page rather than torturing people with one of these MENSA-level CAPTCHAs. Thanks for your time.

• January 1, 2005: Laura and I launched a fitness weblog, Starling Fitness. It’s now quite popular, with 1400-1500 visitors a day, and has built enough of a community that we get comments often.
• March 3, 2005: Facing unprecedented levels of traffic, I moved most of my sites to a new dual-Xeon server. It handled the beginning-of-the-school-year rush nicely, and hopefully will last another year or so.
• March 31, 2005: Darren at Problogger published an interview with me, probably the first time I’ve been interviewed.
• April 12, 2005: I wrote my first WordPress plug-in, View Future Posts. It was well-received and the announcement has over 40 comments. I’ll be releasing an updated version soon.
• May 17, 2005: I launched a new weblog, Sequenced Notes, focusing on making music with computers and electronics. That one’s mostly for fun, and it still doesn’t have much of a readership, but I’ve enjoyed writing about my musical hobby.
• May 19, 2005: Google launched their Personalized Google feature, and included my Quotes of the Day as one of the default components. This has brought an extra 100,000+ visitors a month to the site and is now responsible for just over 5% of its total traffic.
• July 21, 2005: We launched The Quotations Weblog as part of my most popular site, The Quotations Page. Thanks largely to Laura’s regular writing, this weblog now gets about 1200 visitors a day.
• September 4, 2005: We launched the new WordPress-based version of The Gadgets Page. It’s grown rapidly since then, now seeing about 800 unique visitors a day.
• November 7, 2005: The Quotations Page had its best traffic day ever, with 124,687 unique visitors. The holidays slow things down, but I expect to beat that record in January.

Now that I list it all out, it’s been a busy year, and I haven’t mentioned the book project that’s kept me busy the last couple of months. I’ve missed out on a few accomplishments—like my goal of posting here once a day—but all in all, 2005 was a pretty good year. I’ll save my 2006 goals for the next post.

While that’s true as far as this particular worm is concerned, there is definitely at least one exploit in the wild that can affect Wordpress 1.5.1 and earlier. I’ve seen some attempts at using this exploit on my sites before I upgraded to 1.5.2. Don’t assume your Wordpress installation is secure unless you’ve upgraded to 1.5.2.

The comments are the same “enjoyed your site” gibberish as usual, except that they include URLs of legitimate sites. Along with my quotation site, URLs included those of several other popular quotation sites and a couple of Linux-related sites. I didn’t find a single suspicious URL that could be that of the spammers, so this appears to strictly be an attempt to victimize popular sites.

The spam seems to use anonymous proxies or compromised machines, because it uses a wide variety of IP addresses, mostly in third-world countries. I can only guess their motivations:

1. To discredit popular sites with “spam” links and attempt to damage their rankings in Google
2. To get whitelisted by appearing as a legitimate comment (not likely, but maybe the legitimate site URLs will confuse some webmasters)
3. To pollute spam URL blacklists by getting popular sites into them
4. To further confuse the whole comment spam issue by making it look like “good” sites engage in it

Number 3 looks like the only thing that has any possibility of working, and in general I doubt this will accomplish anything at all. It’s still very annoying, though—just like running a mailing list, here’s another way that running a popular site means having to deal with people who think you’re spamming them from time to time.