I've reverted all 6100+ posts to "draft" mode and am leaving up this one, the very first one, and yesterday's, and that's about it. No one has been invited or disinvited from the site. If you are a regular reader you've probably already read most of the stuff you wanted to read.
I'm leaving these three up to see what happens with the relentless page view attacks but I'm pessimistic. I am loathe to post more if the content is just used to perpetrate some nefarious scheme or fraud. We've had over 100,000 pageviews from one server in Vietnam just this morning. Not good. But I'm cautiously optimistic that just having a few current posts up at a time might make remote hanky-panky less efficient and thus less practical to continue...
You've all been mostly very nice to drop by, read and comment over the years. There may come a time when Google resolves the issues I'm dealing with here but since Blogger is a free service they offer I don't think VSL is a high priority for them. Especially as the blog is not enrolled in Adsense or any other profit generating feature. Google doesn't have traditional, human support for their free services. Users have to research their own issues and keep digging down to find solutions; if solutions are to be found.
I plan to more of less start from scratch now, posting as through I'm starting over instead of keeping up the entire archive of past posts. That means = stay current, read posts timely; they will go away into a non-public archive.
Comments are still open but will be tightly moderated for the time being...
If you have a question I'm not that hard to find. Leave a ??? in the comments. But no! No one is getting any special access treatment. We are not a rock concert. There is no back stage pass. No VIP section.
Sad that the 16 years of blogging here might come to a halt because of events beyond my control. But not just yet. I'm trying my best to work around this...
15 comments:
Very sad to see you go. I'll miss reading about your adventures, even swimming. I wish you , B and Ben well.
Well this sure sucks!
Very sad to see this Kurt! Long time reader but barely comment (not great, I know). Have always enjoyed your takes on life and photography and hope you will continue. I'm not an expert at all but I suppose I would respectfully ask, is a lot of odd traffic really a problem? Sure it may seem weird but I'm not sure how it could really negatively affect you. Maybe it's some AI training server crawling the web and it will stop. Anyway, hope to see you continue on ;) -Ken
I still think you should bring it up with Google. If it’s happening to you then it’s happening to others. Maybe Google has a good idea of what’s actually happening. Whatever you decide, Kirk, your regulars here will support you.
Very said to see you go too. What a put-off: a Vietnamese scam is causing this. I wish you well.
Hi Donald, I didn't say it was a Vietnamese scam; only that the server location is located in Vietnam. The real owners/scammers can be bouncing location info around pretty easily. I worry about privacy issues....
Hi Ken, All persistent anomalies should be considered a threat and, sadly, Google only has automated info about some of their services. No help desk. No human interaction. I've read everything they've published about traffic issues like this but have found no real resolution or solution to the issue. And, better safe than sorry for me.
Hi Kirk, I know you operate this blog as a no profit, no expense undertaking, however, I wonder if there is anyone in IT in Austin you may know to to reach out to to advise you of any potential dangers and actions you can take to solve this. If I knew more about computers, I would love to send a million emails to the offender.
Hey Kirk,
Hopefully this is a short-lived hiatus, but if it isn't, thanks for the years of posts. I've enjoyed them. And fwiw, as I noted the other day, I did buy the smartbag camera bag after you wrote about it. Will see how it fits into my usage, but it may get its first test this coming weekend when we go on vacation!
Best to you & B&B.
Ken
Hi Kirk, I wonder if some nefarious Asian organization is looking for "visual science" patents that you may be expected to publish. My thought would be to reach out to any IT contacts you may have in Austin to see if they can help you slay this perpetrator. If I had the IT skills, I would see this as a challenge to send this creep(s) an exploding server back.
Hi, long time reader, work full time in IT… I guess I just wonder why you care? From a traffic perspective, that’s all on Google to deal with, and it’s not costing you anything for hosting or bandwidth. For concerns about privacy, if content was posted once for any length of time, just assume there’s a copy of it out there. Just make sure you have a strong password for your Google/Blogger login, and sleep easier!
Hi Anonymous, Is "1,2,3,4" a good password? Just asking for a friend...
Not gone yet.
Not gone yet.
Whan a pain, I'm sorry for you and your readers. It's unfortunate that Blogger doesn't have modern features to block traffic from specific geo-locations or IP ranges. There are ways to achieve this but I get that this is almost certainly more trouble than it's worth to you. With no advertising on the site the only real impacts I can see are annoyance, messed up stats, potentialy slower page load times during periods when the site is experiencing the bot traffic. Google does protect against brute force guessing your password and 16+ character random password is effectively unguessable with current technology.
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