Seems like "quick draw McLumpy" is hoppin' about minus a toe. In other words, I think I just shot myself in the foot.
I have been busy this whole year making sure I live up to at least one of my 12 resolutions, which was to write daily. (I did not promise to "post" daily.) I made this resolution for a number of reasons. One of which was the fact that I am well aware that frequent postings make a blog site work. Who wants to read the same old postings.
As a result, traffic to this site is up, I am getting more comments and e-mail, and Google adSense is even generating a miniscule revenue. This is all good. The down side is that lumpy's corner has become a pretty decent spam magnet. This was quite a problem for me and I spent a good deal of time dealing with it and writting about it.
I did manage to defeat the spam. At first, I did so by breaking things. Over the course of a few days of self education, I managed to beat it in a more constructive manner. More specifically, using MTblacklist and no-follow plugins. (Both of which are the subject of an upcoming blog on comment spam.)
Then something interesting happened. Something flattering as well, I started getting comments from rather well known bloggers. Some one also brought it to my attention that a Google, Yahoo or MSN search for "Lumpy" and this site is the number one or two on the list. This too is good, actually it is great. Now people can easily find me and I had the spam under control.
Lumpy, being the perma-n00b he is, let his head swell, smiled manically, and promptly twirled his anti-spam gun tossed it in his holster and shot himself in the foot... twice as a matter in fact.
The first thing I did was wrote a blog about the barrage of comment spam I was receiving. Unfortunately, I mentioned a certain card game, which starts with "P" and is five letters long. This dorked my AdSense... The Google bot crawled my site and promptly placed ads which linked to the very same type of spammer I was trying to block.
Lumpy, being an over achiever, had to top that feat though. The next bullet was a special time-delay, senile stealth bomb...
During my spam battle, I enabled "hot link" protection. I then completely forgot I did so... WTG Lumpbrain. This really hurt me when Matt Hartley quoted my blog in an article for lockergnome. He included a link to my site. The hot link protection blocked it!
I apologize for my senility. After about four hours of frustration, I did recall the hot link protection was on. It was only meant to be on as a temporary fix for the previously mentioned barrage.
