Spammer gets boot for spamming.

You may have noticed it recently. I would have missed it if not for a post I was trying to work on. We had a spammer among our reviewers (No names, please. We already know who it is.). It managed to poison my Westworld review with drug adverts, and caused two other posts to “disappear” with HTML tags. I managed to clean up the review, but didn’t realize the tag-poisoning until I saw the source from the “Corporations-Are-People” piece. I was able to clean that story up, but deleted the sexbot story without checking the source. Hopefully, I can find it in a cache somewhere, or someone managed to copy/backup the piece.

After all that, one more cleanup: The spammer’s account has been deleted.

Asleep at the wheel. Having a spammer infect our site is one thing, but not paying attention…

Unfortunately, like with last year’s spam-outbreak on the forums, I have to take some of the blame for not keeping a closer eye on CPR. Somewhere between a 40 hour work week with a 45 mile daily commute round trip, Neocron sessions, digging out from three feet of snow from two storms in a week, and looking for media and stories to review and blog, I lost track of this site and allowed the spammer(s) to do their dirty work.

Extra eyes needed. As you can see (!), running a website is a full-time occupation. Not easy when you already have a full-time occupation like consulting or document imaging, and your second doesn’t come with a paycheck. This is where we can use some help from our regular visitors and registered users. If you see what appears to be spam, shoot a private message to me. I will check it out and, if need be, delete it.

In the mean time, I’m going to make it a point to visit every day even if I don’t have anything to post. Nothing worse than seeing a good site being smothered in spam.