Jason Pearce

I run several community blogs that maintain an open registration process, meaning a new user can create a new account and begin adding content to the website. Two examples include www.thirdgoal.com and voices.crossandcrescent.com.

User-generated content is nothing new, for many sites permit strangers to comment. But in the WordPress world, there are many plugins and tools to protect the site from comment spam. There are no tools, however, to prevent a spammer from creating hundreds of new accounts and then submitting multiple blog entries.

To keep this from happening on the sites I maintain, I simply delete the bogus new user accounts hours after they are created. I know they are bogus because they have usernames like “alasdflwhw” or use temporary email addresses (for the required email confirmation).

Today, I submitted a feature request to the WordPress community to address this growing problem:

Idea: Block Lists for Register Confirmation Emails

Problem: When “Membership: Anyone can register” is enabled (for multi-user community blogs), spammers are creating hundreds of new accounts using temporary email address services. So they’ll receive the “Your username and password” email confirmation; giving them access to post full entries on the community-blog website.

Proposed Solution: Provide an easy way for admins to maintain a block list of domains that WordPress cannot send emails to, pre-populating the list with the most common temporary email address services.

My Experience: While I do receive an email notification when a user creates a new account, I have to manually delete those users who are obviously using temporary account names and email addresses. While the free @hotmail.com and @gmail.com accounts are less obvious, I have a list of 20 temporary email domains that are frequently used.

For my 2007 New Year’s Resolution, I vow to adopt and frequently use the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI).

I learned about Yahoo’s YUI while reading 24 Ways over the holidays. Once I got over the disbelief of having not learned of YUI until now, I couldn’t wait to use it in an upcoming project.

Why YUI Will Change My Life in 2007

There are so many things to like about YUI. Here are the features that excite me the most.

YUI Grids CSS

Grids blows me away. In less than 2.5kb of CSS code, YUI Grids offers almost 200 preset layouts and a great deal of customizations. Grid layouts can be fixed or fluid and columns are source-order independent. It’s everything One True Layout hoped to be, but done so much better.

YUI CSS Grid Builder

Dav Glass built a tool that allows you to try out all 200 Grids wireframes in seconds. What a great time saver.

A Grade Browsers

Another great thing about YUI is that Yahoo’s developers are committed to making it’s code work for what they call A Grade Browsers. By focusing on progressive enhancement, Yahoo builds a rich experience on top of an accessible core, without compromising that core.

JavaScript Library

The heart of the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is really a robust JavaScript library. While I was already tinkering with other JavaScript libraries, the YUI Library is so well documented I can no longer resist.

Will others adopt YUI?

I’d really like to see MediaWiki skins and WordPress themes that are based on YUI CSS and JavaScript libraries. My first YUI sandbox project was to try to make my FratMan MediaWiki Skin adopt the YUI framework. While I ran out of time to complete the project during the holiday, YUI sure provides a more stable skin.

YUI has renewed my passion for good web design. It provides a very flexible — yet sturdy — foundation for me to construct all of the web development projects I’m bound to face in 2007.

After more than 10 years of service, I’ve finally had it with Network Solutions and am now on the hunt for a new registrar. I’m fed up with NetSol’s constant upselling as well as their refusal to stop sending me emails from domains I don’t recognize (see my post “Network Solutions Phishing & Spam“).

I simply want a domain registar that will help me easily manage my domains and their DNS settings without having to click through screen after screen pitching yet another service I don’t need.

Since I’ve been with NetSol for so long and rarely looked at their competitors, I thought I’d look up the registars some of my favorite blogs are using. So here is a list of 50 domains and the 23 registars they are using.

What registar are you partial to?

MediaWiki is a free application, registered under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It is used to run Wikipedia, the World’s largest online encyclopedia, as well as many other wikis.

Fratman is a minimalist skin for MediaWiki-driven websites. Originally developed by Jason Pearce, users began making enhancements and fixing bugs. To better facilitate community-driven development of this popular skin, the project has moved to Google code. If you would like to participate, please in further developing this skin, please send me your Google username. So far, there’s nothing there, so if you want to help get things started, I’d appreciate it.

• FratMan skin (v1.4) by Pearce (fraternitymanuals.com)
• FraternalRelief skin (v1.4) by Pearce
• FratMan skin (v1.4) by Castley
• FratMan skin (v1.5) by Castley
• FratMan skin (v1.7) by Anand

Previous posts about this skin within my website can be found here.

For three months one of my email accounts has been receiving unwanted Network Solutions emails sent from servers other than *.networksolutions.com.

The emails come from or contain links to *.ed10.com, *.ed4.net, and *.ed10.net. These domains are not registered to Network Solutions.

In March I wrote about “Symantec Phishing,” and Network Solution’s emails bear a striking resemblance.

I have repeatedly reported my concerns/complaint to Network Solutions via email and phone. Each time, I have asked them to discontinue emailing *@lambdachi.org from servers other than *.networksolutions.com. So far, my concern/complaint goes unresolved.

This time, however, they replied with the following canned response:

Unwanted bulk email or “Spam” is a growing concern for Network Solutions’ customers, Internet users, and businesses providing Internet services. If we determine that one of our E-mail customers is sending spam, we can terminate their service under the terms of our Acceptable Use Policy. Because domain names are easily replaced and many spammers have multiple domain name registrations, deleting a domain name will rarely stop spamming activities.

My complaint is that they are source of emails that resemble phishing scams. More so, they are unwanted and are thus spam.

So I guess the only way for me to stop getting spam from Network Solutions is for me to terminate their service. What a pain they have been.