Secondly, one of our dedicated servers will be down for some electrical maintenance, the transformer that supplies power to the hosting company has to be taken offline for 3 to 5 hours to repair a “high voltage elbow“.  This is semi-emergency maintenance, there was a fire in a nearby building recently, and upon inspecting all the transformers in the area the electric company found several needing repairs.  Work is scheduled to begin around 08:00 CST (13:00 GMT) and will take anywhere from 3 to 5 hours, hopefully more towards the lower end.  This outage will affect the blogs on that dedicated server (which are most of the bigger blogs besides Random Curiosity), the main site and my blog.

We apologize for the inconvenience!

Update: We’ve had some reports that users were seeing oddities such as a hover border over icons.  If this is happening to you, you’ll need to force your browser to update its cached copy of the Antenna’s stylesheet.  To do this simply hold down the shift key while you click on refresh.  Everything should look correct after that!

Note: Most screenshots have been resized smaller than they appear on the actual Antenna.  Some links will not work unless you’re logged in.

User Accounts

New with version 2.1 is user accounts.  On the sidebar is a new section entitled “Login” where you’ll be able to login after you have an account.  To the right of the User field is a link to the registration page.  Account registration is fully automated but requires E-mail validation.  Below is a screencap of this new section of the sidebar:

Once you’re logged in all the new customization features will become available.

Customizing Your Feed

Customizing your feed and the site works the same way, you just need to add the series, blogs and/or channels you want to your feed.  Below is an example of how this works from the series list.  In this screenshot you can see that I have Lucky Star and Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS as part of my custom feed.

To add any series just click the checkbox next to that series in the list, once you’ve selected all the ones you want you simply scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the “Update” button.  This will add all the series you selected to your list (as well as remove any you uncheck).  You can also remove series/blogs/channels from your feed from under the “Edit My Feed” submenu of the “User” menu.  This is the page you’ll be taken to once clicking on update as well.

Adding channels works exactly the same as adding series, you go to the Channels section of the Antenna and can select which channels you want as part of your feed.  Adding blogs works similarly, except you’ll need to add them from the Last 2 Weeks section under the “Blogs” menu.  This page lists all the blogs that have posted in the last 2 weeks.

To access your custom feed, simply point your RSS reader to http://antenna.animeblogger.net/feed/user/username/  If you prefer to use Atom then use http://antenna.animeblogger.net/atom/user/username/  Do note that the trailing slash is important, leaving it off will cause you to get a redirect to the URL with the trailing slash each time, making the feed load slower.

Channels

Channels are also new with version 2.1 and offer collections of feeds that are related.  The “Main” channel contains all the feeds that display on the main feed by default, these are all English language blogs and non-hentai.  The “AnimeBlogger.net” channel contains feeds for all blogs hosted by AnimeBlogger.net.  We will be adding other channels as we have time, currently we plan to do Anime (blogs that focus primarily on anime), Manga (blogs that have a significant focus on manga), & Figures (blogs that focus significantly on figure collecting).  We’re open to suggestions for other channels and will add others as we think of them as well.  If you think your blog belongs in a particular channel(s), feel free to let us know which one(s).

You can access feeds of each channel, just point your RSS reader to http://antenna.animeblogger.net/feed/channels/channelname/  Be sure to include the trailing slash.

User Preferences

Under the “Preferences” submenu of the “User” menu, users are able to modify how the site displays for them.  Here you change the number of posts that will be per page, picking either 10, 15, 20 or 25 posts per page.  Also, due to popular request, you can also turn off the display of excerpts as well as the section under excerpts that shows what series a post has been flagged with.  The “Main Page” option controls what feed you will see when you navigate to the Antenna.  If you select “Main Feed” you will see the normal main feed that you’ve always seen, however if you select “User Feed” you will see your personalized feed instead.  Do note that if you click on “Home” while already at the Antenna you will be redirected to the Main channel.  This is done intentionally so that you can still access the main feed even with the “User Feed” option selected.  You may return to your custom feed at any time by navigating to the “User” menu, which will take you to the “My Feed” submenu by default.  Additionally you can change your password and/or E-mail address on this page.

Below is an example of what the site looks like with both excerpts and series turned off:

Blog & Series Icons

Another new feature for version 2.1 is blog and series icons.  Each series has an icon and these icons will appear on the right of the series section along with the text links to series.  Up to 4 series icons can appear, if there are more than 4 series then the top 4 ranked series are used for icons based on our series rankings.  For each blog that has submitted an icon, one will appear on the right of the blog name/post title section.  Blog icons link to the page for that blog, which I’ll cover in the next section.

If you have turned off the series section then none of the series icons will appear.

Blog Pages

Similar to our individual series pages that the Antenna already had, each blog aggregated now has a blog page.  On this page there is a description box that appears if that blog has submitted an icon and/or a description.  In the description box the full-sized blog icon is used (128×128px) with the description text to the right of the icon.

We’d love to have icons and descriptions for every blog listed with us, please submit yours to antenna dash submissions @ animeblogger dot net.    (Replace dash with a – dot with a . and remove all spaces.)  Icons must be 128×128px in size and in PNG format.  Upon approval your icon will be installed and show on all your posts on the Antenna.

Blog Cloud & Last 2 Week Views

Under the “Blogs” menu you’ll find two different views, “Cloud View” and “Last 2 Weeks“.  In “Cloud View”, ranking is currently determined by a custom measure of consistency in posting (both how often and how many posts made).  Once we have more users we’ll also be considering how often a blog is added to custom feeds in our ranking formula.  Only blogs with a ranking of 0.1 or higher are shown in this view, so depending on activity levels only blogs from the last few days may be represented.  In “Last 2 Weeks” view, the blogs listed here are only those that have made a post within the last 2 weeks and they are are ranked according to how many posts they’ve made.

XML-RPC Ping Server

This new feature is useful if you’re wanting the Antenna to pull your new posts faster.  To use it simply add http://rpc.antenna.animeblogger.net/ to the list of update servers your blog pings when you write a new post.  In Wordpress this is in the Dashboard under “Options” | “Writing” | “Update Services”.  You most likely will already have http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ filled in here, simply add our Ping Server to the list on the line below that one as shown in the screenshot below:

Any other blogging software can also use our Ping Server as long as it supports XML-RPC Pings.  When using our Ping Server the Antenna will receive an XML-RPC ping whenever you publish a new post.  It will then pull your feed and update the listings with any new posts.

Code Validation

We’re pleased to announce that the Antenna fully validates as Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional, Valid CSS, Valid RSS 2.0 and Valid Atom 1.0.  Occasionally we get a post that has a bad character in it that causes the RSS & Atom validators to fail, but all content we control is valid.

FAQ

More of a minor addition but we’ve added a “FAQ” (Frequently Asked Questions) page to the Antenna.  Currently there are only a couple of questions up but we’ll be adding more in the near future, especially as we receive more questions.

Finally a couple of features that aren’t new because they were in Antenna v2.0 but since we didn’t announce them back in July when we switched over to 2.0 now’s a good time to point them out.

Series Cloud & Last 2 Week Views

“Last 2 Weeks” view lists only the series posted about in the last 2 weeks ranked by a custom formula that tracks how actively a series is being posted about.  This view allows you to more easily see what series are the most popular.  Series “Cloud View” displays a cloud view of all series with font size varying depending on ranking.  All series are listed here, not just those with posts from the last two weeks.

Spammers, and their spambots, view every single script they can find online as a target.  Those of you who’ve had tagboards or shoutboxes will know exactly what I mean, spammers will try to see if the tagboard/shoutbox script can be abused to send their spam E-mails.  You’ll end up with mail headers from their test attempts posted as comments.  As annoying as they are though, there are some very smart people out there writing the bots that they use to attack us.  In dealing with spam on the site, I’ve noticed that the patterns of attack are very different depending on the attacked service.

On my own blog all the spam attempts, since I did away with the shoutbox I first had up, have been comment spam and trackback spam.  Dealing with these hasn’t been too much of a pain, for a while I just set all comments to requiring admin approval thus making all the spam comments get held for moderation.  Eventually I installed Spam Karma 2 and it has caught every single spam comment and trackback since I installed it.  Looking at the spam I do get on the blog it’s nearly 100% medical/drug spams.

On our forums a good 99% of the spambot attempts are to create an account with their spammy links put into the URL and signature fields.  Since I’ve dealt with this for well over a year, I can say for certain that they generally don’t even bother to activate the account.  They just create the account and be done with it.  Originally I dealt with these by deleting all info from the profile fields, banning the username and E-mail address, flagging them with a special rank (”banned spammer”) and then making their accounts inactive.  As time went on the frequency of these spambot signups went way up.  At one point I was doing the above process to over 5 usernames a day.  I did some research on the problem at this point and discovered a simple mod that would stop the majority of these attempts and prevent the rest from getting a valid link into their profiles.  I also found out that the spambots don’t browse the forum normally and try to signup, they’ve been coded to understand how PhpBB forums work and go straight for the signup, sticking their links into the fields directly.  With the new script in place the URL and Signature fields do not display on the signup form and cannot be accessed by users until they’ve reached a post threshold.  Therefore anything trying to submit a signup with those fields filled in must be a spambot.  On average I get at least 6 of these blocked attempts a day.  Occasionally a spambot will just not give up when the process fails.  Two days ago one attempted to register 16 times in a row, using random nicknames, passwords and links — all from the same IP address.  Normally I file the reports on attempted spambot signups and do nothing more with them, but when I get one that attempts to signup 16 times I will ban the IP permanently.  As for the spambots that manage to register (these are more “stupid” bots and apparently actually use the real registration page), I can tell that they’re spambots easily 99% of the time and I delete the accounts and ban the E-mail address they used.  (If the domain name used in the E-mail is a spam site I ban the entire domain.)  The types of attempted spam on the forums is all over the map, I’ve seen some really strange stuff, even things like dentists!  It appears that spammers use forums as their general dumping ground.

Since the Antenna is an aggregator and accepts submittals for new blogs it gets spammed too.  There are two main culprits on the blog submittals — ringtones and OnlyPunjab, a very spammy Search Engine Optimization “company”.  Most days there’s anywhere from 2 to 6 spam blog submissions, and since all blogs are approved by a human none of these make it through.  We don’t just accept submissions for new blogs though, we also accept submissions for new series and alternate names of series.  The spambots have absolutely no clue what to make of this portion of the page and on a normal day I have 8-20 (and occasionally more) alternate series name submissions for “good site”.  Apparently the spambots think this is a comment area and treat it as such.  They like to start their comment spam with “good site”, as if this will make it any less apparent that the comment’s spam.

Finally we have a wiki (that’s greatly underutilized so I won’t bother linking it) and the spambots go after it too.  Thankfully they’ve slowed down dramatically since the wiki’s not being used much (and thus not linked much) but at its worst I was having to revert edits on 20-50 (yes fifty) pages a day.  Often different spambots would hit and overwrite the spam of the last one.  To help defend against this I set the wiki to require a logged in user account to edit/create pages.  This didn’t help any at all, the spambots are smart enough to register, spam a few pages, then register a new account and repeat.  So in addition to reverting all those spam edits each day I was having to ban 3-5 spambot user accounts a day as well.  The spam that hits the wiki is quite varied but tends to stay the same on a month to month basis.  Some months have had almost nothing but music-related spam (interestingly many of these name the link to look like a Mp3, so apparently spammers are trying to pull in users hunting for Mp3s online).  This month’s have mostly been about heaters and other wintery items.  One thing that is surprising is their obsession with creating a page for Serin, which is a small bird in the Finch family.  Even Wikipedia (the number one result when Googling for Serin) has a very small page with little information on it.  Another reason this is surprising is that by just creating the page and not linking it from the main index or another article it’s effectively an orphaned page, and incredibly unlikely to show up in search results of major search engines.  To date I’ve deleted that page (and its talk page) over 10 times.

You really have to be dealing with many different things (blogs, forums, wikis, aggregators) from the admin side to see these patterns though and I thought others might find them interesting as well.  Also, many spammers try to justify what they do and claim it doesn’t harm anyone or cost anyone anything.  I think pretty much all non-spammers don’t buy that argument, but the above makes it very clear that there is a cost from what they do for their victims — in time.  Time’s valuable, I know I have a lot better things to do than deal with cleaning up after spammers and fighting them off, yet I have to spend at least an hour every day dealing with them.

Feel free to comment with your own spam fighting stories, I’m sure everyone’s got them and I’d like to hear them!