I was savoring that cup of coffee this morning. It was a delight and made the mood better as I finished up some issues that were dragging Windows to Russia down…
Most readers do not realize that it is just not readers that stop by a web site. There is a whole array of trashy spambots, spam robots, automated commenting and dozens of other pain in the butt type things that destroy a websites peace and tranquility…
After over 30,000 automated comments in about two days and that is on top of the millions that I have received over the years. I have destroyed the comment system in the WordPress system that we have. It is history, kaput, exiled, stomped in the ground and removed from the coding…
Comments have always been an issue and the increase in spam was exponentially growing faster than the systems can keep ahead of it. So two days ago I made the move. It has been so quiet in back of the house on the blog, that it echoed. No spam, no automated comments and no trash at all. No unnecessary load on the servers and no drop in page counts. For quite awhile I have been blocking spam and just sending it to the trash immediately. I knew that real comments have been hurt by this but it was so overwhelming that there was nothing else to do about it…
Now it is all on a outside server and not on mine anymore. Livefyre.com is the new system and it is fairly basic and not a lot of bells and whistles. It is easy to use Twitter, Facebook, Google and Link-in to sign in with. If you want to spam it, then spam it because you are on their server not mine anymore…
Sometimes that spam was so bad that it would affect the operation of Windows to Russia. It would slow things down and on a shared server that is not good. WordPress is referred to as a spam magnet and I can vouch for that…
I just turned off the magnet…
Now lets talk about the Ukraine Blockage issue. Progress is being made and my hosting company is a little bit perturbed by the issue. I have recruited a hosting company in Ukraine to help and we are trying to pin point what is happening. Right now it is just not my site that is blocked but has been extended to the whole server that Windows to Russia resides on. This situation is blocking some large websites and news websites. I expect it to be cleared up, but the desire to find out who and how it is being done has become a priority. What started out being just my site blocked three weeks ago has now become a server of 300+ websites. All blocked in Ukraine…
This issues is not good and I have been happy to see that Ukrainian server hosts are dead set against what has happened. I have been offered to set up a mirror in Ukraine to get around the issue. Many Ukrainian hosts are non USA based and they are proud of that fact. That is something that we will have to see about later. We were ranked very high in Ukraine before this happened on Alexa. Alexa had us ranked at 9000 in Ukraine and that ranking is being lost now..
Kyle Keeton
Windows to Russia!