Author: Ian

Inane Comments Spam Attack!

In the past 36 hours, I received exactly 64 spam comments posted to this blog.  They all come to my email for approval first (for just this reason) and I haven’t seen anything like this before.  I’m still trying to piece it together, given this information:

  1. The comments all contain a generic remark that could be used on any blog, such as “wow, cool, i’ve been looking for this info all day!”
  2. Each comment has one word intentionally misspelled, such as “cheeerd.”
  3. I have SI Captcha anti-spam installed here, so this was either a sophisticated Captcha-breaking bot or someone was paid to enter the Captcha codes.
  4. Most interestingly, there is no motive I can find.  They are not linking back to a website selling $18 Nikes.  For the URL, they always put yahoo.com or google.com or something else totally generic.  The email addresses seem valid but don’t have any rhyme or reason to them.
Clearly someone wanted to get a bunch of comments up here, but they weren’t going to drive traffic anywhere and didn’t advertise anything.  My only guess is that this was a recon mission to see which blogs are penetrable.  Whoever masterminds these could just Google the terms including misspellings, and find the blogs this tactic has worked on, and direct the real spamming efforts towards those.
SEO enthusiasts or anyone with knowledge of spam tactics, please let me know what this was all about, because it’s left me really curious.

Escape Goat: Two Development Weeks Remaining

Last weekend, I made a 3-week plan to finish this game.  So far I’m on track with week 1 behind me.  I have a draft of the game that includes about half the levels I need, and the game mechanics have been solidified.  I made a lot of changes along the way to get things to this point.  I wish I could go into detail here, but it’ll spoil the surprise, and the changes will have to be enumerated in a future postmortem-style article.

So what’s left?

  • Music
  • Some of the sound effects
  • Graphics touch-up work
  • Some level design
  • Editor user-friendliness
Over the last week, my list of “done” tasks is about twice as long as the “to complete” tasks I built at the start of the week.  This is because while making levels, I uncovered a few glitches (even in my squish detection logic) and reworked the design of some of the gadgets to allow for more interesting puzzles.  This week I will keep the code and design reworks to a minimum and just focus on content.  Praying for no major bugs to appear.

Happy Bluehost Customer

Today I had a great customer experience with Bluehost, who serves up this website and a couple others of mine.  They emailed me about a security vulnerability in a file used in a WordPress plugin I have installed, and told me how to remove it.  I wanted to make sure it was gone, so I opened up one of those live chat things, and the rep taught me how to use the File Manager in their control panel to search for files.  The wait to chat with someone was less than 2 minutes.

It’s going to be way more common to find gripes about customer service, because it’s more likely you notice when something goes wrong than when something goes right.  Plus, as a powerless consumer you sometimes feel your only recourse for gross mistreatment is posting a rant on the internet.  I am plenty guilty of that.  So to counterbalance things a bit, I just wanted to say a few kind words about Bluehost.

They are inexpensive, have way more features than I would ever need, have good customer support, and I can’t remember the last time the server went down.  If you are looking for somewhere to host your website, please check them out.