If you’ve tried to access sknoblog in the last few days, you were either met with an error page, or with the blog peppered with lines of error messages…
My ISP offers free Web hosting, but they have adopted rather radical measures recently. Basically, when a database table grows too big, too fast, it triggers the following two measures:
1/ they block the site for 24h (1st warning–2nd warning is 72h and on the 3rd offense, they block the site for good!)
2/ they simply destroy the offending database table.
This happened to the Geeks recently, but it only destroyed a stats table that grew too fast after a big surge in visits to the site.
This time, they blocked sknoblog and destroyed the comments table.
Every single comment ever posted on sknoblog is gone. Forever.
Now while this might smack of the Stockholm syndrome, I don’t feel bad towards the ISP. They host scores of sites and this radical policy is an anti-spam measure. They allow me to host as many sites as I want. For free (as part as my monthly subscription).
You have to understand that when you host a blog, spammers immediately start posting fake comments to create links towards the products they are pushing. So you install anti-spam software, which holds the fake messages for moderation (so they don’t appear on the site). Part of my daily routine is making sure there aren’t legitimate comments hidden among the fake messages hawking penile enhancing miracle drugs and porn sites, then deleting the spam. I get an average of 80 spam messages per day per blog.
In the year since the Geeks went on line, 5646 spam messages have been blocked. On Frogblog, the number is 21923 blocked messages since October 4th 2006.
So I blame the spammers. Over 95% of all email exchanged over the Internet is Spam. Spam is overrunning the system. It is the product of pure greed, and breeds on the sheer idiocy of the morons who keep the spammers in business by taking the bait.
I also blame the USA’s general indifference to anything and everything. They are so used to being spammed on TV and radio that they don’t see anything wrong with it. It’s entrepreneurship. It’s business. Most Spam comes from the US where as we all know, greed is good.
America is indeed number one. The number one polluter of the planet and of the Internet. Big surprise.
Anyway, enough ranting.
I’ve managed to recreate the table (from another WP site of mine) which should take care of most of the error messages.
I’ve blocked commenting for now (I think/I hope).
I need to upgrade Sknoblog to WordPress 2.x which has better spam-prevention features (it’s still running on WP 1.5).
Have a nice day.