(never only) 40hr/week job (project manager), a wife and a year old child

I am just about to launch my second big(ish) side project.

When outside my "real job", the priorities are with my child and my wife. So the time for anything else is scarce and the most is done after both of them go to bed.

- limit your TV

- limit your distractions on the computer (I use RescueTime)

- learn to differentiate between motion and action (http://jamesclear.com/taking-action)

- automate everything you can

- motivation, motivation, motivation (when sitting on the toilet you aren't thinking about your side project, you don't want it bad enough)

- outsource

I build so I can learn new skills. So until now outsourcing wasn't a part of the master plan. But you are correct, delegating the right way is also an option to boost development.

Don't worry about spam bots. One of my websites has more than 2500 visitors daily and I am still waiting for the first spam comment. Spammers don't search pages by hand. Their programs look for "footprints" of the usual software (ie Wordpress) and try to automatically add comments. If you build your own commenting system from scratch and use the good practice for building (preventing XSS..), you are ok.

Or put it this way, if your website becomes so popular, that spammers will customize their programs to try to automatically post on your page, you have bigger problems :)

I run http://blogspam.net/ which does real-time spam blocking for forums/blogs/etc. On the whole you're correct, spammers go for easy targets.

But I started the project when a custom CMS of mine (more or less) started getting added to the spammer-lists. It seems like it's only a matter of time these days until people find your site and submit 10-500 comments a day. Some I can see are clearly bots, or compromised IPs, others are clearly humans (presumably paid very cheaply).

Did you have auto-aprove comments? AA is a spammers heaven, and they will walk the extra mile if they find that kind of a CMS. Even if you have no-follow links. Very nice initiative for the spam-fight though. How high is your success rate? Do you use any blueprints for spun comments?

I'm not sure what you mean by "auto-approve" - There are plugins for things like wordpress which will junk comments automatically, solely on the result of the test, but others are more fine-grained. (The API does allow whitelisting/blacklisting by IP, etc.)

The success rate is pretty fluid but about 80% of comments submitted were judged to be spam today. Whether there are too many false negatives/positives is hard for me to say ..

Auto-approve - comments in blog show up immediately without moderation or approval.

Good luck with fighting spam. There are never enough of you!

Interesting, thanks for responding!

Are there any other forum moderation tools you would recommend (not competitors, obviously)? I'm curious what else is available to the homebrewer.

Akismet is probably the biggest alternative.

Thanks! This helps a lot. Part of my curiosity about commenting best practice stems from an ignorance of how spambots really work.

It's nice to hear from someone in the same space.

No problem CoreSet. Look at it this way. You will learn something. Oh, and have a kill-switch readdy if Murphy comes (disable comments, non auto approve, something like that). @stevekemp also has a valid point in another comment of his. If you write your own functionality, you store the comments. If you use 3rd party app, they store your comments. This can be the tipping point for some people.

How the spammers work. Really short and banal explanation: - dear program, find wordpress blogs (in a certain niche, or any blog - I am not picky today) - footprint of the day will be "powered by wordpress"

- thanks for the list, now check each url if that blog has a form for comments enabled

- great, now, because you were programmed to know which inputs (name, e-mail, content) (and with what names/IDs) needed to be filled, use my predefined texts and submit

- oh, and if you see a capcha, would you be so kind to OCR it and fill the right text there also? thanks

- check after one hour if the comment is visible (yes? woohoo - we found an auto-approve blog! - no? ok, check in one week)

Hmm, that gave me an idea for a honeypot webpage. One single page with footprints of many blogs and forums, some forms on it and IP logger. Every IP that would like to submit anything on this page, goes to the sh.tlist.

I have a donate button on one of my projects. The site gets 1k+ visitors per day but in the last 4 months since I have the button I only got one donation. It is not as high on my priority list, so I haven't fiddled with it yet.

I would say the same. You need to be a local to know your way around. Until you become one, you are going to miscalculate your arrival time. This is why good developers are exponentially better than bad developers.

your comments show the power&depth of this analogy. the challenge for an effective local driver is to avoid routine and remain cautious and flexible to react to the changes in his leaned-by-heart territory: new rules, roadsigns, changes in traffic organization, self-driving cars etc.

True. I may be the best driver in Slovenia, but when I want to drive to Manhattan, I will have a bad time (pun intended). I will learn to drive there faster than somebody who is also bad in Slovenia, but I will still need my time.

This is what happens if you think in one language and write in another. :) Yes, I am from a bit south of Germany, from Slovenia.

Sorry about that. I don't get so much traffic usually.

Use all 8 directions (4 walls and 4 corners). Number them from 0 to 7 or 1 to 8. Pull out one hair with the root. Use that root as an arrow. Throw the hair and watch till it lands on the ground. Use the number that the root is pointing to. Repeat. For a better effect try to blow at the hair while in air so it spins more.

Working on "helping you drive economically, everywhere". http://www.mylpg.eu

This looks like a great tool. I think changing the domain name might be a good idea since some people may not infer that mylpg = miles per gallon.

nitpicking: mylpg = my Liquified Petroleum Gas, as this is a site for lpg-fueled cars. Also, given the context of the site (x stations in Europe, .eu TLD), it's unlikely he'd want 'mpg' in the domain name as Europeans don't use miles or gallons.

I launched a web site about alternative fuel LPG, mostly about fuel stations in Europe (http://www.mylpg.eu). At first it was a test to feel the market, but now I found out it has potential.

Wow, does it take a lot of (crowdsourced) manpower to keep the database up-to-date?