Tag: spam

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Blogging Journal Technology

Gremlins

Sorry everyone for the recent disappearance of my comments writing field. I haven’t a clue what has caused this and I’ve been going through all my plugins and administrative hoochie-koochie trying to figure it out. A real waste of a perfectly good weekend.

To top it off I seem to have attracted the unrelenting attention of some hideous trackback spammer who has every day been sending hundreds of spam to my site. I’ve tried everything to stop the bastard, including turning on being logged in to comment, but I can’t shake him. And last night, by chance, I discovered that the bathybius has seen fit a few weeks ago to hack into my account and create an unauthorized folder with spam links there. Aaaaarrrrggghhhh! I’d like to….!

Give me a few days to figure this out. I’ve been sitting here half the day and I really need to get outside for some fresh air.
_________________

Update:

Phew! Got the comments worked out. Seemed like I installed a certain plugin a little while ago that set my front page to a static page. That’s part of what I want to develop in the site, but not with the set up I have now. It should be working now.

Categories
Blogging Journal Technology

Be Nice To Spammers Day

Scary moon

Scary moonI came across this article while browsing for more enlightened content. All I could think of was that my level of tolerance for spammers has reached zero porosity… it seems the laws are working to make life viable for these blood-sucking vermin (all apologies to mosquitoes, tick, leeches, and vampire bats being in order), while all the rest of us must continue to endure them. But really, who truly CARES if spammers’ sites were overwhelmed by traffic or if their sites were shut down? It’s not like their lives were threatened. Anyone who inundates my site with garbage and makes no apologies, while providing me with little means of preventing them from using my bandwidth, ought to have their own sites shut down. Or better yet, their access to the internet denied altogether.

Am I being too harsh here? People aren’t allowed to walk unannounced into my house and using my appliances without my permission… why is it allowed on the internet?

Categories
Blogging Journal

Phew!

When I got home from work this evening I switched on the computer, sat down in my trusty swivel chair, and flicked the cursor over to my e-mail client… and promptly got a load full of 160 e-mails, mostly spam. Among these there were several e-mails from readers, telling me that my ripple journal could not be accessed. When I opened the journal in my browser, I found all the posts of yesterday deleted, everything that had had anything to do with all the spamming that had been going on.

My first reaction was total panic and when it dawned on me that I wouldn’t have a clue what to do if there had been some malicious targeting of my site, deep, sinking depression. I was so down about the possibility that someone might wish me harm that I seriously thought about just giving up blogging altogether. I just didn’t want to deal with all the stupid technical stuff and was mentally exhausted from the onslaught of the past week. Months of working at and learning how to put together a blog had developed a sense of accomplishment and pride that left me feeling pretty vulnerable when the possibility of losing it to some creep who couldn’t care less hit me.

Sometimes my imagination gets the better of me, though. After pulling myself away from the computer to sit and watch a children’s animation on TV and just forget about all this mess (and eating a delicious tiramisu pudding in the process) I came back, renewed, and headed over to my server homepage to have a chat with the administrator. To my surprise I discovered that the server’s hard drive had failed right about the time I had posted my last posts. THAT explained the loss of my data. And WHAT A RELIEF THAT WAS! I contacted the administrator and right away he replied that he had managed to save my index file from earlier in the day. Phew!

An interesting side thought, though. While I pondered the effects of possibly not being able to continue the blog, I also realized just how wrapped up in it I was. I have to remember that the journal is not my life; it is what I am trying to write about that is my life. Hopefully I can remember this.

Now to get back to real writing!

Apology

I’ve been trying to restore all the data in my website from before the server crash, but unfortunately only my main blog content could be retrieved. All the recent comments that everyone made have been permanently lost. I apologize to everyone for this. It is my policy never to touch comments in any way, unless the content is lewd, overly belligerant, irrelevant to this journal (such as spam), or disrespectful to me or others who leave comments here. Since the crash I’ve backed up the whole site, just in case. Comments are part of the journal, so I would prefer to preserve them if I can. I hope the deletion of former comments doesn’t affect anyone leaving comments.

Categories
Blogging Journal

Bad Taste

I feel like I’ve just emerged from three days of slogging through a sewer. One spam blight after another, with no time to write about what I really love. I hope I’ve fixed the problems for now. I’m off to my evening work now, but hope, when I get back, to post one or two of the offline essays that I’ve been writing while on the train. I’ll have to leave a little early so I can sit down in a quiet cafe and take my time eating something nice to cover the taste of bile in my mouth and settle the twist of my guts.

Thanks everyone for your input on all this. It’s interesting; publishing companies would probably die to have problem solving feedback as immediate and diverse as this. Think of all the time saved on editing and layout! Quite a learning experience.

Categories
Blogging Journal

Quirky

Two people have now e-mailed me to tell me that my page isn’t showing up right on their screens. I can’t reproduce the problem on my own browsers. is anyone else having this problem? Is there a difference between Mac users and Windows users? Where does the problem start within the page’s text? Is this problem only recent?

I’m wondering if it has something to do with the hacking of Blogrolling’s files the other day, since the coding for that is located in my sidebar. I haven’t touched anything in my site’s structure, so I’m not sure what is going on. No one ever complained about this before. Did someone go into my server files and mess something up? I wish I knew more about all this. The spamming and hacking are going beyond my level of experience or knowledge.

I’d appreciate any feedback on what you are experiencing with the page.

Thanks everyone.

Update:

I want to thank everyone for sending information on how the site appeared to them. Really appreciate it. Sort of eased the sudden panic I had that maybe my site was falling apart!

It looks like the problem is with the Windows version of Internet Explorer. The page works fine on my Mac version of IE. Until I can figure out how to fix this problem (IE is supposed to cause a lot of headaches for CSS structured websites), may I recommend two browsers (free, all platforms) that would fix the problem for you? Mozilla or Mozilla Firebird. Firebird is still in development, but is a fast and elegant browser nonetheless. You can even download an extension through the browser interface ( Firebird Extensions ) called “Edit CSS” that allows you to view and change ( only in your browser, of course! ) the CSS coding of any page that you download. Very useful for learning CSS.

I’ve been spending so much time trying to work out spam and hacker and improperly configured website coding for my site that I haven’t had time to publish the daily stories I’ve been writing off line! Ahhhh! Still can’t figure out why Internet Explorer suddenly went haywire with my site though.

Update 2

Wow, what a total headache this is causing. Dozens of people have contacted me now about the sudden change in my blog, and not being able to read it any more, whereas before there was no problem (all with Internet Explorer, Windows version). I went through my CSS codes and couldn’t find anything wrong with theme (at least nothing more wrong than before). I haven’t made any changes for about two months now, so the sudden problems don’t make any sense.

I did come across a mention on Japan Bloggers by Oli about spammers now using referrers javascript to insinuate themselves into people’s web pages: ( http://www.idly.org/2003/11/14/porn_sites_hiding_behind_blogs.php , Spammers in Referrers ) LINK REMOVED. I think it in itself is spam. Please do not quote this link on your blog or comments, it will automatically create a trackback to the Idly.org site… Since I was using a referrer script at the bottom left of the sidebar and only put it in a few days ago, and only yesterday a strange link which defied the width of my sidebar appeared that didn’t lead anywhere, I wonder if that was the problem. I’ve since removed the referrer script.

Does the page appear normal again now? I hope so.

If the referrer is the problem I would like to warn anybody else using Stephen Downes’s Referral System to be careful. I will contact him to let him know, and perhaps get some advice from him. In the meantime, to any people who are using referrers on their site, please be careful. Some of those links down there might be spam.

Update 3

Ignorance knows no bounds… What I took for spam was actually a lack of knowledge on my part of problems with CSS coding. All I had to do was specify the width of the referrer’s links to prevent overstepping the sidebar bounds and all was all right. Kind of embarrassing to have shared my ignorance and outrage with all the world. If there was anyone out there referring to my site whose link left a longer than usual link signature, please forgive any critical assessment I made of your link, calling it spam. I should learn before I speak…

Categories
Blogging Journal

Bathybius Slime

I’m having somewhat a hard time feeling generous at the very moment. I opened my blog this evening and discovered that someone had gone into my blogroll account, deleted all my blog links in my blogroll, and put 25 links to their own blog instead ( http://rockergirl.zapto.org ). I’ve now lost all the links that I so carefully gathered these last few months. I’ve changed my password, but I wonder if that will stop this spammer. I am monumentally pissed off. The other spams were bad enough, but this has invaded something that belongs to me and I am not going to have any patience whatsoever listening to some maggot argue that they have some constitutional right to change my work.

I am going to fight this and I hope that somehow I can start banding together with others to put a complete and utter stop to all spammers. I’ve had enough of this!

It appears I spoke too soon. The blogroll is back. I checked around on other sites and it seems the Laura Blog hack was all over the web. What happened? Who did that?

Poor Jason of BlogRolling wrote that he had recieved over 3000 e-mails today concerning the hack: BlogRolling Hack. It’s amazing how such a small thing can make the whole web shudder.