programming: August 2008 Archives

I am getting really tired of the trackback spam. I was looking around in my MySQL administrator and found the tables that Movable Type uses to track tentative trackbacks (mt_tbping) and banned IP addresses (mt_ipbanlist). I wrote up a little SQL to copy IP addresses from unapproved trackback locations to the banned list:

INSERT INTO mt_ipbanlist
(ipbanlist_blog_id, ipbanlist_ip)
SELECT MY_BLOG_ID, tbping_ip
FROM mt_tbping
WHERE tbping_ip <> 'MY_HOST_IP_ADDRESS'
AND tbping_ip NOT IN (
	SELECT ipbanlist_ip 
	FROM mt_ipbanlist
	WHERE ipbanlist_blog_id = MY_BLOG_ID)

Of course, I'll have to check that all unapproved trackbacks are spam first, but I am hoping that the volume drops in time.

2008-08-13: added my list of banned IP addresses, trackback spammers one and all.

LinqPad is a subsystem interpreter for LINQ in the same vein as:

• regular expression tools
  like RegexDesigner.NET or Expresso or RegexDesigner
• C# snippet compiler
• ADO.NET CSV file tester
• .NET Format Designer

It allows you to test out all the LINQ features in .NET 3.5 against any data source of your choosing, plus it provides lots of test cases and sample data sources. I recommend LINQ Pocket Reference to go with this.