Please leave your spam at the door!
Many of you may have noticed how there’s not been all that many posts recently on this toolblog. Well there’s many reasons for this. One reason is the amount of spam/adverts/fake posts that are automatically created and flood the blog on a regular basis. Yes, I had all the IP blockers and other “spammer” tools but they had no or little effect. I would come on line with every intention of writing an interesting, useful or funny post, but instead have spent all my time “weeding” the spam from my comments, sometimes 1,000 a day! As I say this was until recently, I’ve got the spam down to 10 a month, which is a lot more palatable and means I can actually get on with writing that epic blog post.
This blog uses wordpress, which in my experience has many problems when it comes to being spammed by bots, before you start! You can take all the precautions, install all the add-ons and come back to the blog the next week with 5,000 – 10,000 spam comments you need to review, and delete or approve; mostly viagra, porn, dating, Russian, Polish or just weird random medical sites! But yes, there are some real comments in there too! Real actual people reading the blog, not just spam bots!
The one thing I’ve done which helped me get the spam down was putting the Google Captcha add-on into the blog. This means that when someone writes a comment, they have to click a Captcha box next to the comment they’re posting. Humans can, but bots can’t, so this gets rid of most of the spammers immediately. So my advice would be to install Google captcha as soon as possible to make your life easier, and you will be able to write blog posts, instead of sitting for hours ploughing through spam comments and rubbish. It doesn’t get rid of everything but it will mean the difference between spending an hour and spending five minutes taking care of your spam issues.
This, in turn, means that there should be more blog posts coming more regularly in the future with hopefully some guest bloggers too. So stay tuned.
The state of tools and of Christmas..
As we move into December in a few day’s time. Our thoughts turn to Christmas and the commercialism of the high street; Who started their Christmas sales around August 31st, with all the quality street and heros they had left over from last year. Here at Langs, we try to leave it till late November before we even think about putting up trees and decorations, and even then sometimes we don’t bother with all the frills and glitz.
Obviously being a commercial enterprise, we have suppliers who offer many goods they think would make incredible Christmas gifts. Rather than just pushing all these goods, we pick the best of what’s on offer (usually 10 or 12) and then recommend these as the best available deals for Christmas. These will be put into a separate post at the beginning of December.
Christmas and looking forward to 2020 and onwards…
We have some interesting Christmas bargains this year as you will see if you look over at Langs Industrial From torches by LED Lenser to Dewalt power drills. There’s something for everyone, even as a stocking filler.
This is a good opportunity to tell you our Christmas closure times for this year. Over the Christmas period we will be closing from the 21st December 2019 and then will be back on 2nd January 2020 bright and early for the new year!
In 2020 Langs will be celebrating their 74th year of trading since Fred Lang opened his little engineer’s supply back in 1946 – Making 2021 the magical 75th anniversary year since opening.
So lots to look forward to in the next few weeks, months and even years…
