The Hobby Webmaster Blog

I thought that I really need to redo the landing page at Event Staff Online. This is a site that I put up primarily for my daughter and another event bartender, but it does have a few other listings. I need to make the landing page better at soliciting sign-ups if the site is to grow and be viable. I do get an amazing number of hits, some from people looking for event work and some through a few of the images that are posted on the site.

When I opened the page in my web editor I found that I have not updated this site recently. So this will turn into another site rebuild. There are not that many pages, but I will bring the site up to my current standard and add some functional things to try to enhance the performance of the site. This should keep me out of mischief for this evening. Hurry over and see if you catch the site before the update is uploaded. Hurry back to see what the updated site looks like.

The other big excitement around here has to do with the comment system script that I have been using. I have seen visitors to the site that searched by name, and now I have seen a bunch of visits from some one in Kiev Ukraine that is searching for a default line in the installations. These searches are hackers or comment spammers. I have seen a couple of instances of comment spam and I found through a search that there is a hack out there for the system. I am in the process of changing the default titles and lines so that eventually they will not show up in these searches. I will definitely change those things before any new installs.

This will take some time, if ever, before the search engines will stop returning those sites. The information is already indexed, and will keep showing up in searches even after the changes are made, at least until the indexes are updated. In the mean time I will keep my eye on things.

Well, back to the grind. Have a great day!

Today this blog logged its 50,000th attempted spam comment. This is a spambot in high gear. Usually if you refresh the comments page after a few minutes the number of comments marked as spam will have increased. The software catches most of them. I have added a few IP addresses to help the software (and myself) out so I very seldom have to check a comment.

It appears that the spam count will cross 20,000 within minutes. Luckily, the software is catching most of them without bothering me. Go WordPress!!

This blog has become my personal champion for attracting comment spam. Luckily the software takes care of most of them. There must be comment spamming software in existence. It would be nearly physically impossible for individuals to produce the volume of spam comments that I see here. At this writing there are over 10,250 attempts at comment spamming this blog. This is running at a rate of about 2000 attempts a day on this one blog. Most of these come without any visitors to the blog. That means that the software in use goes directly to the comment page rather than entering through the front door.

I recently took a wiki offline because of comment spam. I suspect that there is a setting in the software to alleviate the problem, but I have not yet checked for it. If I do not find the setting I will have to check for other wiki software or take an other approach to building the knowledge base that I hope for.