Has the Digital Point Forums become a hotbed for scammers?

July 20, 2008

I’m an active member on the Digital Point Forums. On that site, I use the handle “Nite.”

The Digital Point Forums advertises itself as a “Search Engine Optimization and Marketing forum.” It is one of many such websites where webmasters go to learn new techniques about raising the visibility level of their personal websites to the search engines. There are a combination of new members and experienced members who market their information and services to those wishing to learn about search engine optimization. In addition, the forum is divided into areas where on-topic discussions and financial transactions take place.

There have been several other blog posts made about Digital Point:

I have only one serious complaint about this forum. Rather, my complaint is not directed toward the forum itself, nor toward its fundamental mission of making information available. My complaint is directed to numerous members of this website who attempt to scam and to defraud other members.

Most scams on the digital point forum will take advantage of those seeking to purchase services with the hope that the result of the purchase will be an increased search engine presence of their website. Indeed, most scams have taken place in the services section of the forum. Most scammers will have a low post count on the forum as well as a low itrader. In addition, most scammers accept Paypal as a form of payment for their services. However, Paypal does not issue refunds for the failure to deliver services or for failure to deliver digital products.

According to Paypal’s Extended Buyer Protection Policy:

Item Qualification Requirements. The item sold must be a tangible, physical item or good which can be shipped. All other items are ineligible for coverage under Extended Buyer Protection with PayPal Credit, including but not limited to intangible goods, services, quasi-cash, gift certificates, and downloadable or streaming content. Motor vehicles (including cars, boats, and planes), and Live Auctions will not be covered. In addition, items prohibited in the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy are ineligible for coverage. If an item does not meet the above requirements, it is ineligible for coverage under Extended Buyer Protection with PayPal Credit.

Therefore, a well executed scam will promise the delivery of some kind of service to be accomplished immediately or in a few days, weeks, or months. And the scam will use paypal as the method of payment. The promised goods and services, and their results, will not be delivered, and paypal will not issue a refund. The scammer will usually have a low post count as well as a low itrader count.

Since it appears that there are those who are all too eager to accept payment before services are rendered, it would make better sense if a percentage of the final cost were accepted in order to begin performing services. However, I believe that it would be even better if payment was surrendered only after completion and verification of the services performed. But upon further reflection, the tables of fraud would be reversed — rather than the seller frauding the buyer, the buyer will be frauding the seller. And while this would give fraudulent buyers a taste of their own medicine, the problem of fraud would still exist.

How else could the issue of fraud be combated?

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A Non-Traditional Wordpress Tuning Guide - Part II

July 19, 2008

Before getting to deep into Wordpress itself, it is important to tune the underlying structures that power Wordpress. In a typical situation, Wordpress runs off of LAMP — Linux, Apache, mySQL, and PHP. There are several blog posts have been written about tuning Wordpress for optimal performance. Some of the references below address the LAMP structure as a whole, while others address a particular aspect of the LAMP structure.

Tweaking PHP is done through the use of a PHP Accelerator and through customizing the PHP.INI file. Now, there are several PHP Accelerators available — but which one offers the faster performance and the most stability? I’ll leave that for you to decide. There are several topics regarding benchmarking of the various accelerators.

What I use on my dedicated server is APC PHP Accelerator. In order to install APC, please read a post on vBulletin that details how to install APC. Inside PHP.INI, I have set the variables to the following:

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; Dynamic Extensions ;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

extension = apc.so
apc.enabled = 1
apc.shm_segments = 1
apc.shm_size = 256
apc.ttl = 7200
apc.user_ttl = 7200
apc.gc_ttl = 7200
apc.mmap_file_mask = /tmp/apc.XXXXXX
apc.enable_cli = 1
apc.num_files_hint = 2500
apc.stat = 1
apc.filters = wp-cache-config

Regarding tuning and optimizing mySQL, there have also been several blog posts made. Of course, some blogs have covered tuning PHP along with tuning mySQL. Basically, the file that contains all the tweakable variables is my.cnf. Both tuning-primer and mysqlsla can offer insight into slow mySQL queries. Read their documentation, download them, and install them.

Please keep in mind, that the my.cnf is always a work in progress.

[mysqld]
datadir=/var/lib/mysql
socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock
skip-locking
skip-innodb
back_log = 50
query_cache_limit = 3M
query_cache_size = 64M
query_cache_type = 1
interactive_timeout = 100
wait_timeout = 15
connect_timeout = 10000
interactive_timeout = 25
thread_cache_size = 1024
join_buffer = 3M
read_rnd_buffer_size = 3096K
max_connect_errors = 10
thread_concurrency = 4
server-id = 1
key_buffer = 192M
max_allowed_packet = 32M
thread_stack = 128K
thread_cache = 3096
read_buffer_size = 3096K
sort_buffer_size = 3096K
myisam_sort_buffer_size = 48M
key_buffer_size = 192M
net_buffer_length = 16k
max_tmp_tables = 512
table_cache = 1536
max_connections = 150
log_slow_queries = /var/log/mysqld.slow.log
long_query_time = 1
tmp_table_size = 64M
max_heap_table_size = 64M
query_cache_min_res_unit = 1
low_priority_updates = 1
concurrent_insert = 2
record_buffer = 3M
[safe_mysqld]
open_files_limit=7092
[mysqldump]
quick
max_allowed_packet=64M
max_allowed_packet=64M
[mysql]
no-auto-rehash
[isamchk]
key_buffer=48M
sort_buffer=48M
read_buffer=24
write_buffer=24M
[myisamchk]
key_buffer=48M
sort_buffer=48M
read_buffer=24M
write_buffer=24M
[mysqlhotcopy]
interactive-timeout

Tuning Apache is done primarily through the httpd.conf file. I have included an example copy of my tweaked and tuned httpd.conf file — a SMALL beginning section of it. I wouldn’t recommend copying and pasting it; however, after inspecting it, if you find something useful — then feel free to use sections of it.

<Directory “/”>
Options All
AllowOverride All
Options -Indexes
Options +FollowSymLinks

</Directory>

<Directory “/usr/local/apache/htdocs”>
Options Includes Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

</Directory>

# Prevent .htaccess and .htpasswd files from being viewed by web clients

<Files ~ “^error_log$”>
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
Satisfy All
</Files>

<Files “^\.ht”>
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</Files>

# Protect files
<Files ~ “^(.*)\.(inc|inc\.php|tpl|sql)$”>
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
</Files>

# Protect directories
<Files ~ “^(backup|aom|images|design|files|images|include|lang|libs(/.+)?|temp(/.+)?|templates(/.+)?|javascripts(/.+)?)$”>
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
</Files>

<IfModule log_config_module>
LogFormat “%h %l %u %t \”%r\” %>s %b \”%{Referer}i\” \”%{User-Agent}i\”" combined
LogFormat “%h %l %u %t \”%r\” %>s %b” common

CustomLog “logs/access_log” common

<IfModule logio_module>
LogFormat “%h %l %u %t \”%r\” %>s %b \”%{Referer}i\” \”%{User-Agent}i\” %I %O” combinedio

</IfModule>

</IfModule>

<IfModule alias_module>
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ “/usr/local/apache/cgi-bin/”

</IfModule>

<Directory “/usr/local/apache/cgi-bin”>
AllowOverride None
Options None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

</Directory>

<IfModule mime_module>
TypesConfig conf/mime.types
AddType application/x-compress .Z
AddType application/x-gzip .gz .tgz

</IfModule>

#######################
# Optimizations #
#######################

HostnameLookups Off
ServerSignature Off
ServerTokens ProductOnly

Timeout 120
KeepAlive On
MaxKeepAliveRequests 100
KeepAliveTimeout 2

<IfModule prefork.c>
StartServers 10
MinSpareServers 10
MaxSpareServers 15
ServerLimit 150
MaxClients 150
MaxRequestsPerChild 500
</IfModule>

Header unset Pragma
FileETag None
Header unset ETag

# Turn on Expires and set default to 0
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A0

# Set up caching on media files for 1 year (forever?)
<FilesMatch “\.(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav)$”>
ExpiresDefault A29030400
Header append Cache-Control “public”
</FilesMatch>

# Set up caching on media files for 1 week
<FilesMatch “\.(gif|jpe?g|png|swf)$”>
ExpiresDefault A604800
Header append Cache-Control “public, must-revalidate”
</FilesMatch>

# Set up cache on media files for 3 days
<FilesMatch “\.(css|js|txt)$”>
ExpiresDefault “access plus 3 days”
Header append Cache-Control “public, must-revalidate”
</FilesMatch>

# Set up 2 Hour caching on commonly updated files
<FilesMatch “\.(xml|html|htm)$”>
ExpiresDefault A7200
Header append Cache-Control “public, must-revalidate”
</FilesMatch>

# Force no caching for dynamic files
<FilesMatch “\.(php|cgi|pl)$”>
ExpiresActive Off
Header set Cache-Control “private, no-cache, no-store, proxy-revalidate, no-transform”
Header set Pragma “no-cache”
</FilesMatch>

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ \
no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
\.(?:exe|t?gz|zip|bz2|sit|rar)$ \
no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.pdf$ no-gzip dont-vary
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

######################

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