Administrative note.

My site is getting hammered. Ever since I opened up comments on that Long Tail entry, I’ve been flooded with blogspam. And even though comments have been shut down, that doesn’t seem to matter to the source of the spam which now has my site on some master list I guess. If I could simply block the IP addresses I would, but whoever is behind this has a sophisticated little arrangement – buying domain names for temporary use and then quick resale (and it appears that these are registered by and relayed through real people in the U.S., perhaps employed through the internet). Their machines then appear to either hop from proxy to proxy or are employing unsuspecting “zombies” to send out feelers. I suspect it’s the latter, since each visit from the “comment probe bot” downloads the contents of my blog – all of it. I’m admittingly guessing since I don’t really pay attention to how that sort of thing is done, but this appears to me to be how my bandwidth is getting ripped apart. Every search I do, regardless of referrer domain, goes back to the same domain name company which then goes back to another private domain and the same two IP addresses.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I’m getting hit by a ton of people (mostly Europeans – who’d have thought), all looking for cracks to the p o r n videogame I mentioned here. The losers were even directly linking to the image I posted (I may have to stop posting images). Unfortunately I’m still at the top of most search results when they type in those two words so you can imagine the ongoing traffic. Wonderful. Not exactly the crowd I hoped to attract.

All this is to say I may have to temporarily pull the site down.

I don’t have advertising. And I don’t have the tools or time to fend off blogspam attacks. I suppose I have the option of going with Blogger or Typepad, but I like hosting my own blog. In the end, the option may not be available to me.