Buddy4u vs Spammers Round 2 March 28, 2006
Posted by Owen in : Website , add a commentIn the continuing saga of Sanity versus the Spammers, war has been declared. The spammers have decided to spam my “Contact Us” form with hundreds of “comments” a day for soma (the drug from Brave New World?), Xanax (yes, the spam is making my anxious, thank you), paxil weight gain formula (a big seller, I guess), and cheap hgh (so I can be fat and young looking). Now since the comments are emailed directly to me and no one else can read them, I don’t think it’s a very effective method of advertising. Even worse, every single damn submission comes from a different IP address. Now I really can say that spammers are out to get me using a fleet of zombie’d computers. Where’s my Xanax?
Spammers 2, Me 0
Buddy4u vs Spammers March 24, 2006
Posted by Owen in : Website , add a comment
Recently, Buddy4u has been the target of a spam campaign. Someone has been making a lot of profiles, pumping them high in Google’s rankings, and redirecting users to a spam page when they click through. For example, Buddy4u is in the #6 position for a search on “tmobile”, #6 on “bcbg”, #5 on “rockport shoes”, #4 on “free nextel ringtones”, and so forth. See my screenshot from the Google Sitemaps website.
Now, of course, I’ve taken steps to prevent the spammers from registering more profiles and deleted all the spam profiles I could find, but the damage is done. While my reputation is (slightly) tarnished, at least these particular spammers won’t see any further benefit out of their illegitimate profiles. I have no idea how they got these content-free profiles to such a high ranking in such a short time, but I’m sure it wasn’t kosher. Sigh. Spammers 1, Buddy4u 0.
Why do my servers always crash and burn at 2 AM? March 20, 2006
Posted by Owen in : Website , 1 comment so farAnd how the hell can tech support be so chipper at this hour?
Iconator Animator March 9, 2006
Posted by Owen in : Website , 1 comment so farCheck out this new tool I made: You upload some images and it creates an animated buddy icon out of them. You can then use drag and drop to reorder the animator and there’s lots of size and compression options. It’s like having a copy of GIF Animation Studio right on the web! It’s really a cool tool with lots of little hidden features. For example, if you upload an image that’s already animated, it’ll decompose it and let you remix the frames. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
Think so? March 9, 2006
Posted by Owen in : Life , add a commentFrom Associated Press:
Much of the controversy has focused on 10 words: “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.”
President Bush made the statement in a television interview last Sept. 1, three days after Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast and inundated much of New Orleans.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan has said Bush’s comments were not intended to suggest that no one had anticipated levee failures.
I guess McClellan must be focussing on the first three words of Bush’s comment.