Scriptbloggers

OMG! I can’t describe how great it feels to log in to my admin panel and see only 12 comments waiting for approval! I’m not trying to blame my own faults on anything else but high volume of spam comments were one of the reasons I got frustrated and kinda slowed down working on the site and maintaining it which then resulted in the whole tragic story of getting hacked and its side effects.

When I compare my blog with some of my friends’ blogs, I see I’m getting 10 times more spam than most of them and I see the reason in not using “no follow” for the external links which I’ve already discussed here.

I still believe in not using it on Scriptbloggers to give more value and show some appreciation to valuable comment authors but if you are planning to do the same, you have to accept the spam flood as a result.

Cheers,
Soroush

It was so frustrating to review and moderate more than 300 comments a day containing 99.9% spam, only because of the possibility of losing a few real comments.
Since at least 95% of those spam comments were actually trackbacks and not comments, using CAPTCHA or other human confirmation methods didn’t help.
So the only way for me was to disable pingbacks and trackbacks in Wordpress settings but it only works for the new posts and has no effect on the old ones which are the target of most attacks.
I had to edit all the posts, one by one and remove the check-mark beside “Allow Pings” which is just too much to do! So here is the tiny little MySQL query that does the magic:
UPDATE wp_posts SET `ping_status`='closed';
TADAAA! It disabled the ping_status for all the posts.

I know I won’t receive pingbacks but I think it worth an extra an hour a day I will save by not going through spam comments. Now I can spend more time doing something more creative on scriptbloggers.

Cheers,
Soroush

Just a quick update: After around a month since it got removed from Google’s index, scriptbloggers is finally back in the results and apparently it is taking back its serp positions again (fingers crossed :D)

In order to gain back Google’s trust I’m going to update the blog more often with fresh and useful content. So keep in touch, I’m sure there will be something useful for everyone

After all, I still don’t have a real purpose for this blog and I still don’t know why I’m doing all this …

Cheers,
Soroush

Passing more than 2 months since I got most of my sites hacked, I’m still dealing with its direct and indirect effects.
Anyway I’m not going to give up, instead I’m going to share my experiences with other webmasters, hope it prevents someone from being in such horrible situation.

Lesson 1: Keep all your scripts up-to-date and subscribe to receive security updates.
I don’t think it needs any more explaination! I love open-source free scripts like Wordpress but there is also a huge disadvantage in them; When a bug or security hole is found, it becomes public in close to no time.

Lesson 2: When possible DON’T store all your sites under the same ftp account! Some web hosting providers like DreamHost let you create unlimited ftp usernames and host each domain under an individual ftp account. This way, in case someone break into one of your sites, the rest will be safe.

Lesson 3: Once a while, briefly check the log file reports. You may get surprised finding some hackers/spammers footprints, trying different methods to find their favorite backdoor. There is also worse situation which they’ve already sneaked in and uploaded their own script or modified yours for their purpose. Either way, checking log file report will show you all the requests served. Remember, tag based/Javascript based reports show only activities on the pages tagged with the tracking code and not all the pages.

I think that’s enough for now
There is a huge checklist to keep in mind but in my idea, these 3 are the most important ones.

Cheers,
Soroush

Last year I bought some domains from someone on DP and unfortunately they were registered at isimtescil.net which is a Turkish registrar. I just asked him to open an account for me and transfer the domains to my account. I logged into my account, changed their name servers and turned all those domains to blogs and added them to my blog network (Allied Network Inc.) and they all gained good Pageranks over the year with a reasonable amount of traffic.

Everything was fine till the time for renewal came. I logged into my account, tried to renew all my domains but it simply didn’t accept my credit card, then I tried to get the authorization code to transfer them to another registrar but got another wiered error. The day after I tried to log in to my account and I found it suspended! Contacted their technical support by submitting a ticket and they replied asking for the copy of my passport, then I replied the same ticket asking “How should I send it to you?” and didn’t get any reply.

The next day when I logged in to their ticketing system, I found my ticket is deleted! Since I had all the ticket information I opened another ticket asking what happend to the ticket number blah blah and guess what! This ticket got removed within 2 hours. Tried it two more times, got no reply and got my ticket removed again and again. So I finally gave up and decided to let the domains expire and catch them when they are released but now I see they have been renewed, parked and showing ads while the registrant, tech and admin info hasn’t been changed on whois database.

Another lesson for me to stick to my trustworthy registrars even if they are a bit more expensive.

I’ll definitely follow up and will keep here updated.

Cheers,

Soroush

Well, I deserved it!
I was already affected by security holes in the outdated versions of wordpress’ on many of my blogs and websites but apparently having some of my sites hacked and down for around a week and losing some other forever wasn’t enough to force me keep my sites updated with security patches and updates. I kindly kept Scriptbloggers open to all spammers who are aware of the hole.
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Well, what can I put as the title when I haven’t done anything on the blog since Feb. 15th?!

All I can say is that I’ve been super busy and had lots of things going on in personal life putting me between online and offline life, but it’s not an excuse for someone with such high hopes, expectations and goals.

Anyway businesswise, things could be much better but I know it has never been perfect and it will never be.

• Most of my sites got hacked and so far I couldn’t recover them all.
• Scriptbloggers got spammed like crazy and it took me hours to clean up 105 pages of spam comments.
• Upgrade to wordpress 2.5.0 caused a lot of incompatibility issues and caused some of my sites to go down till I found the solution.

The only site I’ve worked on since, was Articlesale.com which keeps showing me its potentials.

To be honest I didn’t have plan to start writing on ScriptBloggers at least for a while till I get somewhere close to an automated business but reading some comments here was a great incentive and push.

I appreciate everyone’s time and feel responsible for that. As you all know, there is almost no ad of any kind on Scriptbloggers and there won’t be so the whole point of this blog is to teach, learn and discuss. I believe it’s real BLOGGING.

Oops I forgot to say Hi and now I can’t find a suitable place to put it Like most of my projects which I forget to set the checkpoints upfront and I end up with a messy situation.

Crossing fingures, I will start blogging again. Oh, I’ve already started

Keep in touch!

Cheers,

Soroush

P.S. I’ve read this post 10 times already, playing with words and making it worse and worse. This is what happens when you don’t write for a while! I’m going to publish it this time, please be easy on me this time

I know, I know, I know! You probably ask if there’s any question in it and 99% the answer is “YES” all in caps

I kept 1% reserved for me and people like me. Honestly that’s a hard question to be answered and a though decision to make!

From what I’ve seen so far, it’s one of the best ways to earn money online and there’s no limit ’cause practically there’s no limit in the products and services you can offer but it’s kinda far from being innovative, productive and what I consider being ME!

I’ve always been playing around for a long time looking at the ideas, unique services and helpful resources aiming to make my very own unique thing, either a product or service and so far I’ve done it so many times and it gives me such a great pleasure to see it works and people like it, but the fact is that I’m limited to a few services to offer while in affiliate marketing there’s barely a limit in most categories!

And when I want to expand the boundaries, situation gets worse, as it is now and I have to handle too many things at the same time which is not fun nor helpful.

Everytime I need a service which I can’t find a good one, I decide to start my own and that resulted in a two-page long incomplete project list which I have here.

So as usual I came to the same spot, affiliate marketing or my own business? Then if the answer is the second one, which project? And does it worth the time and effort?

I’ll give myself some time to find what I really want to do and which direction to choose.

It’s a big legal issue and I can’t speak for sure ’cause it’s a big responsibility but I leave the judgment to the readers and wait to hear other similar situations to make sure. After all even if that’s true, I think there’s nothing we can do like all other spammers.

First of all I should say that I had some domains with Registerfly back in the days they were an accredited registrar because of their low prices and promotions. But when ICANN terminated their accreditation, I transferred my domains to other places like most of their other customers.

Anyway today I got 2 emails from them in my Yahoo mail account’s bulk folder, both exactly the same and indicating one of my domains with them is going to expire while after checking that domain I remembered that I’ve already transferred that domain somewhere else and renewed it till 2009. That wasn’t a big deal since that can be a bug in their script which still thinks my domain is registered with them and another bug in their email sender script caused the email to be sent twice BUT looking at my other received spam emails in the bulk folder something smells fishy.

Here is the screenshot:

In fact the server which sent registerfly’s emails AND the one which  sent the other spam emails seem to be the same or at least with the same bug which caused the email to be sent twice!

Just checked the IP addresses the spam emails have been sent from and here are the results:

67.196.144.84
67.196.214.132
67.196.213.186
67.196.22.41
67.196.214.68
70.47.212.173

Both Registerfly emails were sent from 66.135.39.107 so that’s why I can’t speak for sure that they were sent from the same server but considering the situation what you guys think ? Is it just an accident?

Cheers,

Soroush

After my post here, I became so disappointed or better to say scared and thought I should start a new research while that’s really the last thing I need with these many incomplete projects, mostly relied on my SEO strategies. Not that it was the first time it happened but it has never been this bad.

Well, there was barely better news for me than seeing my sites backing up on Google results not as good as they were but still reasonable enough to keep me hopeful.

The fact is that I almost forgot my own most important SEO advice which is PATIENCE and really freaked out to the point I was going to leave everything and take a break from all my online projects. Honestly life is tough enough for me not to need anything extra on the top of it, but I think that could have been my most stupid decision ever which I would regret forever and thanks God it didn’t happen.

Anyway, back to our subject, thanks to Tim Linden who pointed me to RankTrend I now have a central place to keep track of my sites’ search engine rankings and the efforts I make to improve it. I haven’t tried the service yet but looking at its concept, reading the service description, it seems pretty useful and handy. This way at least you can easily see if the strategies you follow, help or hurt and whether to continue or change it.

Alright, I think that’s enough as an update and I should get back to work…

Cheers,

Soroush