Geeklog.net

The Geeklog mailing lists are back up now, after a hiatus that lasted slightly longer than planned. Some problems with the mailing list archives still have to be worked out, but at least they're up again and can be used.

One important change in configuration is that posts from non-subscribers are silently discarded now. Sorry about that, but the amount of spam attempts we get on the mailing lists has just completely gotten out of hand.

So when you post to the mailing lists, please make sure that you're posting from the address you used when you signed up with the list. The geeklog-security mailing list for reporting security issues is, of course, exempted from this change.

There's also a new mailing list, geeklog-spam, devoted to discussions on how to fight comment spam and other forms of spam that affect Geeklog sites. I'm probably going to post most of my spam warnings there, too, and reserve the spam topic for major outbreaks and important issues.

Looking through the server logs of a low-traffic Geeklog site, I couldn't help noticing that Googlebot and its colleagues had been busy there indexing each and every variation of Geeklog's submission forms, e.g.

/submit.php?type=event&mode=&month=08&day=07&year=2004&hour=2
/submit.php?type=event&mode=&month=06&day=17&year=2004&hour=8
etc.

/comment.php?sid=20020513230754519&pid=0&type=article
/comment.php?sid=20020427185655276&pid=0&type=article
etc.

Obviously, it doesn't make a lot of sense to index these particular pages, or the submission forms in general.

There's an easy way to prevent this: Create a robots.txt file.

So you want to try out Geeklog, but don't want to install it just yet? Well, now you can, on our Geeklog Demo Site,

http://demo.geeklog.net/

On this site, you'll find

• a default installl of Geeklog 1.3.9sr1
• the Forum plugin 2.3
• 78 themes

To get a look "behind the scenes", you can log in as the Admin user and create users, blocks, approve stories, etc. The site is reset every hour, so in case it's getting messed up, simply come back again later.

And before everyone asks, a word on the themes ...