Subscribe Today!
Networked Blogs
Jul
23
CourtView alerted chop shop sting suspects
Filed Under crime, Gary Police, Lake County, police | 1 Comment
Lake County, Indiana police running a sting operation to capture auto theft suspects ran into trouble when the Lake County court’s computer system called CourtView showed warrants were issued in the case.
The Post-Tribune reports that suspects were alerted that warrants had been issued when they received letters from attorneys who had been alerted by CourtView to existence of a new criminal cases. It is a common practice for Lake County attorneys to send out letters to potential clients to advise of their services when a new case is filed in court.
Writes Chelsea Schneider Kirk in Procedural blunder may have hampered sting:
As the Lake County Sheriff’s Department lauded a nine-month auto theft sting leading to charges against at least 20 people, a Gary Police Department official close to the investigation said warrants left unsealed for the suspects created problems for officers.
“They were already getting letters from attorneys,” Gary Police Cpl. William Clouse said. “You know what, we’ve never had an issue like this where … the information was out.”
The upshot is that police arrested at least 20 suspects, according to news reports.
Jul
21
What is the best way to stop comment spam?
Filed Under blogging, spam, WordPress | 10 Comments
I’ve been receiving a lot of comment spam recently in the form of one sentence comments that might (or might not) apply to my posts.
Usually, the comments appear on posts in the archive and contain elements in common — such as smiley faces — that make me think that someone or some entity is trying to gain some sort of SEO advantage by leaving the comments and a link to their various websites.
I try to catch spammy comments and mark them as such to help Akismet learn of new spammers, but I have been getting a handful of such comments daily. Usually the comments come in overnight, so I assume they are being done from someplace overseas during their local daytime hours.
The comments aren’t necessarily bad or spammy in themselves. It’s just the fact that they are linking to spammy sites. I don’t want to encourage the spammers to continue leaving comments that I have to remove on a daily basis.
Should I keep marking the comments that are half-way on point as spam?
Should I break their URLS and keep the comment that might make sense, but that doesn’t add much to the conversation?
Is there some sort of WordPress plug-in that might help with the situation?
Let me know by leaving a comment if you’ve experienced the same issue and have found a way to counteract the situation.
