Yesterday the contact forms on my design site were spammed 30 times in the space of half an hour. *Tears hair out* For now, I've put up NL-PHPMail which I've been updating for CG but apprently the captcha still doesn't stop the spammers. Grrrr. I don't know how to use the PHP GD libraries to make complicated images, but if anyone else can then feel free to tell me how...
The stupid thing is that all 30 of these spams only contained a random American city in the URL field. There were no comments whatsoever, no links, no advertising enlargement/medical products, nothing. All there was (apart from a random name and email address that seemed to end in either Green, Miller or Scott) was the city. So I get all these forms filling up my inbox and all they say is "Boston", "NY", "Miami" and other similar cities... Is that pointless or what? There wasn't even any point to it since they weren't trying to sell me a product or increase their Google pagerank or anything. Gah.

Right so I'm back "home" (at my parents') for a week. Rather bored. Got yet another attempt at The Driving Test on Monday, not confident about it but we'll see how it goes.

Oh further to my last post on IE7, I discovered that apart from its CSS being slightly more advanced, it's still as rubbish as IE6 - it still doesn't display <acronym> tags properly and has a huge amount of other errors that I can't be bothered to mention. Oh but it has tabbed browsing and RSS subscription functionality! *Gasp* Wow! /sarcasm
I can see it now - all the n00bs will get confused and say "lyke omg I prefered IE6!!!1" - I know a few people who've already said that to me, haha.

Edit: It's not stopping! Even though I changed the forms and everything - the spam continues! Turns out I'm having to delete the form from the server completely. Dammit. I had renamed it in the hope of being able to work on it later, but apparently that's not good enough. Now I'm getting a ton of 404 error reports on my site for spammers looking for any sort of form script to abuse. They haven't found NL-PHPMail yet though. I hope the image verification will be enough to keep them away from it.
The amount of email spam I get is absolutely ridiculous. I don't need form spam making it worse, thanks.

So the first public IE7 beta has come out (source). Of course, I had to download and try it straight away.

...And guess what, I'm disappointed. Why? Because Microsoft haven't fixed half the bugs that IE6 had. I was reorganising this site's CSS earlier to get rid of IE hacks since IE7 doesn't like them (yes, that was the reason for the red text. Sorry if I blinded you) and these are the mistakes I found IE7 still to have:

1. The float bug still exists.
2. This bug exists too - when you quote a comment on this here site, the "Orginally posted by" text goes missing for some unknown reason. Could also be because of this, I'm not sure which it is.
3. Some block-level elements still don't default to display: block; without specifying so in the CSS (and likewise for some inline elements)
4. This bug has been slightly rectified but it still caused me a major headache because IE was refusing to "listen" to margins specified by #id element when #id > element was also specified - even when the former was written afterwards. In Firefox/Opera/Safari, it doesn't matter whether you write it as #id element or #id > element - if the former is written after the latter, it will override it (I think? I actually haven't tested it! >.< ).

There are more, but I can't be bothered to list them. In short, I had hoped the old peek-a-boo thing would be resolved but it hasn't been, neither have the weird floating problems or width/padding/margin bugs. Blah. Oh, and they (Microsoft) completely ripped off Firefox with their "new features". Tabbed browsing? Live bookmarks? Damn, IE, where have you been?!
/geeky subjects

And now I must go and install a new guestbook on a site I've done for someone because hey guess what, it's being spammed to death. The site's been up for 2 years and only in August did I allow it and my brother's site to be listed on search engines. Now look what happens, spam! Part of the reason why I think this site's been rather lucky in terms of comment/form spam is that it's not indexed by Google or any other major search engine. It's listed, but definitely not indexed (that I'm aware of). Any sub-domains are spammable since they don't have the robots.txt file in their root directories. I did try putting some in, but hostees kept deleting them thinking they were spam or something and anyway it didn't seem to work. The whole disallow / part seemed to make the bots think I meant / of my domain rather than the subdomain and indexed it anyway. So yes, I'm prepared to sacrifice search engine listings for having less spam. Grrrrr. Think I'll go for another installation of Jem's BellaBook. Hopefully blocking some common words should mean stupid porno spammers keep the hell out. Having said that though, they leave "genuine" messages with no specific keywords. Katy blogged about this a while ago - "normal" messages such as:

Hello admin! your site it is so great and useful! I have definitely bookmarked it and will come again! Great work!

...are too similar to genuine ones and are therefore almost impossible to block. ARGH.