I am involved in a joint venture with one of my close friends, Glenn Ansley. It’s the World’s Best Event Calendar Plugin for WordPress (in my humble opinion). Well, if you have a website, you know you’re going to get typical SPAM through your contact form, from so-called “SEO Experts”. We received one the other day that I thought was especially compelling, so much so that I decided to reply to him. Here is the brief email exchange…

Name: Carson White

Email: carsonwhite@sti-creative.com

Comments: Hi,

We carried out a preliminary analysis on your website and discovered the following areas of concern.
1.    Your website attracts limited traffic, which affects potential sales.
2.    Your keywords don’t feature in Google first page, which affects visibility.
3.    Your back links are not good enough, which affects link popularity.
4.    Your website is not properly promoted, which affects the overall score.
We are a Search Engine Optimization service provider and can assist you in overcoming the above mentioned problems. We can perform a more detailed analysis on your website and provide you the plan of action of how we can promote the same.

Please let us know if you require the SEO REPORT on your website at no cost.

Best Regards,
Carson
Systems Technology International Inc.
Michigan: 39555 Orchard Hill Place, Suite 461, Novi, Michigan-48375
New York: 9921 4th Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11209
www (dot) sti-cs (dot) com

Notice: Under The Bill 1618 Title iii passed by the 105th US Congress this mail may not be considered SPAM as long as the contact information is included and a method to be removed from our mailing list stated. If you are not interested in receiving our e-mails then please reply with REMOVE in the subject line and your ID will be removed from our mailing list. We apologize for the inconvenience caused to you.

And my reply…

Hi Carson,

I’ve carried out a preliminary analysis of your email and discovered the following areas of concern.
1.    You think we are suckers.
2.    You most likely implement black-hat “SEO” services that end up hurting companies, rather than helping them.
3     You probably over charge your clients for a service that none of them need. Google actually does a pretty good job of figuring out what is important and what isn’t… without people trying to game the system.
4.    You emailed us about our site not ranking well, but how do you explain finding our site?
5.    The bill S.1618 Title III was passed by the Senate, but was not passed by the House. It takes both the House and the Senate to pass a law. Furthermore, a similar bill, H.R. 3888 was passed by the House, but was not passed by the Senate, thus and again, not making it law. Therefore, your email is SPAM.

We are intelligent human beings and can assist you in overcoming the above mentioned problems. We can help develop a training in ethics, philosophy, and logic and provide you with a plan of action of how to stop SPAMMING and SCAMMING innocent businesses.

Please let us know if you require these lessons at much cost.

Best Regards,

Lew Ayotte
Full Throttle Development, LLC
http://fullthrottledevelopment.com
http://twitter.com/full_throttle
http://twitter.com/lewayotte

For some reason he never replied.

I’ve been in the mood lately to do something “creative” and thought working on an infographic might be fun. I was going to make a graphic showing the price increase of SXSW tickets over the past 15 years, but I lost interest after gathering much of the data. Then I was listening to the Security Now podcast on the TWiT network where Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte were talking about the Monty Hall Problem. If you’re unfamiliar with the Monty Hall Problem it comes from the old game show, Let’s Make a Deal where Monty Hall gives a contestant a choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. The contestant picks a door, say number 1 (but the door is not opened), and Monty, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say number 2, which has a goat. He then asks the contestant if they want to stick with their original choice or switch to door number three.

The Monty Hall Problem is the question, “Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?”

Over the past couple years I’ve worked on a number of WordPress Multi-Sites that wanted to have their comments and pings disabled. In other words, they weren’t accepting comments and didn’t want them to be displayed. Normally this is easy to accomplish, simply turn off comments in the back end.

However, SPAMMERS knowing exactly how WordPress works and how to inject comment SPAM into WordPress. Though, if you do not have comments automatically approved, they definitely should not appear… if a comment does get injected, the WordPress administrator (and author) should receive a notification of a pending comment. So, there is a simple way in WordPress Multi-Site to just set all comment and ping submissions to false. Just stick this little bit of code into a php file in the mu-plugins directory:

add_filter( 'pings_open', '__return_false', 10, 2 );
add_filter( 'comments_open', '__return_false', 10, 2 );

One of the Multi-Site installations that I have this enabled in wanted to allow comments on two of their sites. If this is something you need, just setup a mu-plugin php file that looks like this:

function comments_and_pings_closed( $open, $post_id ) {

	global $blog_id;

	$comment_sites = array( 10, 15 ); // Site IDs of site that you don't want automatically disabled

	if ( in_array( $blog_id, $comment_sites ) ) {

		return $open;

	}

	return false;

}
add_filter( 'pings_open', 'comments_and_pings_closed', 10, 2 );
add_filter( 'comments_open', 'comments_and_pings_closed', 10, 2 );

I had a chance to check out Facebook Video Calling last night with my parents. The video quality seemed really good, actually seemed to be a little better than normal Skyping with my parents. Getting it initially setup was a bit difficult. I had no problem downloading and installing the executable, but my father ran into some issues. After we had everything ironed out and the video was actually videoing, I had a problem where I could not hear anything. As it turns out, the Facebook Video Calling was forcing the audio output to my laptop’s headphone jack. This was the only problem, there is a place to change where the mic source is coming from, but there does not appear to be a place to change where the audio source is sent to. It took a while to figure this out on my end and I suspect it will be one of those hard to figure out problems for a lot of people.

Apart from those hiccups, the only thing I didn’t like about the video call was the forced ‘always on top’ video output. You can minimize the video, but I’d prefer it to just be sitting there with the ability to have stuff over it. Overall, it was a pretty decent trial, needs some work and I am curious about how they plan to upgrade it in the future — e.g. will everyone need to download and reinstall the executable whenever there is an update?

Haven’t had a chance to try out Google+’s Hangout feature yet, but from what I hear it seems like a better implementation than Facebook’s Video Calling.

Have you tried Facebook Video Calling yet? What were your thoughts?