Note, I no longer use Bad Behaviour because of the wonderful Akismet. As a result I have no need to and won’t be maintaining this log reader. For a version that works with more recent versions of Bad Behaviour check here: http://www.jonathanmurray.com/wordpress/2006/07/08/. Also, if you make a new version please leave a comment so others that come here via Google will know, about it thanks.
I’ve received plenty of comment spam before, but over the past week or so it’s been really hitting me. I’ve been getting upwards of 100 spam comments per day. You won’t have noticed any on the site because they were all moderated, but man it was pissing me off to leave the computer for an hour and come back to a dozen or so “please moderate” emails. I tried out a few different plugins to try and solve my woes, but in the end settled on Bad Behaviour. I’m clearly not the only happy customer either, the post I just linked to has over 200 trackbacks.
Bad Behaviour has very successfully stopped the insane amount of comment spam that was overloading my inbox. There is just one MAJOR shortcoming of the WordPress plugin: It doesn’t display the logs in WordPress admin. Apparently it’s on the to do list, but since a privative log viewer for WordPress admin plugin would take about 10 mins to write, I wrote one.
It doesn’t display all the information Bad Behaviour logs, simply because it totally screws up the admin interface and most of it you probably don’t need to see anyway. I have chose the things I like to look at, but it is very easy to change. It’s very privative and easy to improve on, but I don’t have the time. If someone does improve on it, let me know.
Things that would be nice to add:
- Paging
- View more log info for particular entry
- Delete items from the log
- Probably more stuff as well.
Download it: Bad Behavior / Bad Behaviour Log Reader Plugin for WordPress
Installation
Just plop the unzipped file in your plugins directory, upload and activate. You can then check your log in the Options / BB Log Reader panel in your WordPress admin
Support
I don’t really plan to offer any support, because it’s so damn simple. If you can install and use Bad Behaviour then you should be able to do the same with the log reader. But please do leave a comment if you’re having trouble and I’ll see what I can do. Please also leave a comment if you improve it any, I’d like to offer any improvements you make from here as well (or at least link to your site - it’s all about sharing after all).
Change Log
| 0.2 | No longer throws an error if the log is empty. |
Something that’s not happening much these days, unfortunately, is Laura and I just getting out and doing stuff together. I’ll cop most of the blame for that because I’m always doing uni work, or actually being at work, or I just want to sleep. But this morning we slept in late, got up and went into Southbank and visited the Queensland Museum. We’ve both been there plenty of times before, but there is always a new and interesting exhibit[] on display which is just fantastic.
There was lots of interesting stuff to see but I think the exhibit we enjoyed the most was The Waterhole. This was a display of the artwork and descriptions of the development process that went into the book The Waterhole by Graeme Base. It is a most wonderful picture book, as is Animalia, another Graeme Base book that is a favourite of mine (and Laura’s). Quite deservedly, Graeme has received an insane number of awards for his work.
We both really enjoyed the display of stuffed animals as well. I think we were both quite surprised by the size of the tiger on display. They are incredibly large beautiful animals.
The trip to the museum must have had the right effect on Laura, filling her mind with enquiry. Just after we had left the museum, as we were looking for somewhere to have lunch, she asked one of the hard questions. The kind of question you need to prepare yourself for, but no matter how well you’re prepared, it always comes as a shock when they actually ask it. We were just walking along and out of nowhere she asks - “where do cars come from?” That’s right, Laura asked me WHERE CARS COME FROM!!
Well, I can’t deny I was a little shocked, but after I had composed myself from the FITS OF UNCONTROLLABLE LAUGHTER, I decided that it was a serious question that deserved a serious answer. “Well Laura, when two cars love each other very much…”
Internet forums have the advantage, and sometimes significant drawback, that anyone can participate. Of course forums can be moderated, but there is a difficult balance to be struck between building an online community that has a high level of participation and restricting access to users who the moderators consider enhance rather than degrade the community.
The fact that internet forums are very open places is, for the most part, an advantage. A wide variety of opinion is expressed and most people who choose to participate take discussion seriously and are genuinely interested in the topic. Users hope they are able to provide something useful to the community and strive to ask interesting questions and provide thoughtful and accurate responses. More often than not, users who are complete crackpots are quickly and easily identified[]. However, users who aren’t obvious crackpots but aren’t educated on the topic either, present their ill founded opinion as fact, problems start to arise. The overall value of the community falls when users who have come to the forum to ask a question be educated can’t identify the likely level of knowledge other users have.
Most forum software now provides some system to rank the participants, although this is usually done simply via the number of posts they have made. This can be useful for some forums but on others is completely irrelevant and insufficient. Others have gone further and included a system for question askers to rank question answerers. This is a particularly good system for communities where specific answers are required[], such as in forums to provide solutions to programming or software development problems.. But of course, it doesn’t suit all internet communities.
This entire post so far has been a round about way of getting to this paragraph. Discussion forums on stock markets have, for a long time, been a very bad place for amateur stock market enthusiasts to hang out. This is for the simple reason that most of the other participants are also amateurs and 99% of the posts are unqualified opinion based on unsound reasoning. That could all be changing with the new community being created at www.topstocks.com.au
, who are trying to create “the intelligent community”. I was pointed in the direction of Top Stocks while reading the boards over at Young Entrepreneur.[] I haven’t really had a chance to play around there yet, but having read their introduction and and how their system ranks participants, I’m expecting it to be a very popular online community for Australian stock market enthusiasts.
Their ranking system is very well described on their site so I’ll keep this brief. Basically it involves members making “tips” and “bets” on specific stocks that are listed on the ASX. If the predictions turn out to be correct then the user earns points which adds to their credibility rating. I will certainly be trying it out to see how it all works. I believe if you join today (or, lets face it, probably any time soon) you will get a Pro Membership for free.
I just stumbled across this. If you’ve ever watched TV1, VH1, or possibly any other pay TV channels, ever, you should find this funny.