Posts Tagged ‘spam’
2 items.
Apologies if the site is acting a little funky for you. Apparently, they was a huge uptick in spam activity in the comments section, so our generous hosting server froze the database it was running from. We’re trying to come up with a solution to keep spammers out, but they’re a tricky lot. I don’t know what we have in place is keeping them out. I was going through the archives the other day and my Spider-Man 3 review had something like 1,500 comments behind it!
Does anyone have any ideas on how to keep spammers out? If not, I might have to shelf the comments function, which would REALLY bum me out. Send me an e-mail if you’ve got ideas.
Stuff like this always seems to happen when I’m up to my eyeballs in things that need to be taken care of immediately. I’m trying to keep my focus on Wizard World Chicago at the end of the week and am preparing now for that. But stuff keeps distracting me.
One distraction I look forward to is The Triple Feature talkcast over at TalkShoe each week. If you’re not familiar by now, we broadcast every Monday at 9:00 PM CST. I encourage you to participate in tonight’s show. Joe will be going over his recent trip to San Diego Comic Con, I’ll be talking about Theater Hopper’s 5 year anniversary and, of course, there was a WHOLE SLEW of movies that came out this weekend. Among them The Bourne Ultimatum, which had the highest August opening weekend ever.
So we’ll be talking about that.
See you then!
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So I had something interesting happen this week. Theater Hopper was dropped from Google’s index.
Don’t believe me? Go to Google, type in “Theater Hopper” and see what comes up. Notice my URL isn’t displayed anywhere? Yeah. Good times.
So, what happened? Basically, someone hacked the site and placed a bunch of links to web sites selling cheap Viagra inside a hidden <div> tag. The links didn’t manifest in production on the site, but they were being pulled from the code by Google’s spiders and classified as spam.
Since Google has a very firm anti-spam policy (yet, oddly, continues to index literally MILLIONS of sites with malicious intent), my site was pulled from their site for no less than 30 days while I “clean up my code.”
Well, the code has been scrubbed and security has been tightened, but Google yanked me anyway.
I’ve submitted an appeal to be reinstated sooner than 30 days, but Google pretty much says they won’t make any promises.
This is really bad timing for me because I was hoping to attract some new readers after attending the Emerald City Comicon in Seattle last week. Now people can’t find the site.
At this point, I’m trying to raise a big stink to see if I can get Google’s attention. But, in the meantime, my traffic is suffering.
If it’s not too much to ask, can you guys go through the archive and bookmark some of your favorite strips using the ShareThis application under the comic? Index individual pages in Stumble Upon, Reddit, Digg… where ever you have accounts. Post comics to your Facebook page. ANYTHING. It’s the only thing I can think of to have you do to help stop the bleeding from this Google fiasco.
And if you’re reading this post through RSS, I implore you to please come back to the site and read the comic for the next few weeks. Keep your subscription to the feed, but if you could help me out for a short period of time, I would really appreciate it.
Thanks for your help and I’ll keep everyone updated with any change in status.
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