A rip roaring affair

So sometimes you get asked unusual questions in my inbox this morning was a letter from a nice person called Neyma I won’t publish all of it just the bit relevant to this post.

but for now, I have a theoretical question that you may be inclined to
answer -

Is it possible to rip the entire SU database? Can it be done in
one-click or would a bot have to be set? How hard would this be? what
sort of information could we get?
what about for some of the other Social sites?

For Neyma; not all, bot, not easy, stuff, yes

Now I’m sure my emailer has a perfect reasonable reason for theorising about wanting to rip the entire Stumbleupon database but I have a feeling Ebay would not be impressed. So I thought would discuss content scraping how its done and suggest some ways to prevent it.
Read the rest of this entry »

Re-captcha your comments

Comment spam sucks, its as simple as here at Venture Skills blog we get hundreds of spam a day most are caught by Akismet but not all are. If your hosting your own blog or site then no doubt you have tried many combinations. One simple method of reducing spam is a CAPTCHA “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” These provide puzzles which are easy for a human to solve but are much more difficult for a machine. Read the rest of this entry »