Some Stuff is Hard to Block

Oh, look. 

A weensie little bonnet, perfect and gorgeous and…

Well, that’s a half finished shoe. Don’t look at that. It’s coming along.

The hat though, is charming and well worth the fiddly duplicate stitch, and the sewing, and the general screwing around that it cost.  On so many levels I can’t wait to be finished this project. The end result is worth it, but I’m starting to get a headache, and a twitch over my left eye, and that can’t be normal. (I was blaming the new glasses I got last week, but I think it’s the duplicate stitch.)

Also in the category of not normal, is that you won’t be able to comment on this post, or on any posts for a few days.  The blog has continued to have spam problems on a level that should be criminal.  We (and by we, I mean Ken) have installed a bunch of stuff that stops a lot of them from making it to the comments section, but has done nothing to reduce the appalling load on the server.  So many spam comments are being sent that the server has been crashing repeatedly, unable to stagger on under the crushing weight of rejecting them all.  (By so many, I mean thousands and thousands per day, or even per hour. A copy of each comment goes to an inbox on my computer, so that I can read each one, and despite all my best efforts and a huge amount of time, there are currently 105 572 comments there. That’s the real number. It’s not manageable.)  We’ve escalated our response, hiring a company that should be able to figure out how to make it stop, but in the meantime there’s been no option but to shut down the comments so that the blog can at least function a little.  Restarting the server multiple times a day isn’t really working – and it’s an unfair thing to have my hosting company try to manage.

The whole thing fills me with a rage that’s just about incandescent, and I’m not kidding when I say I think it should be illegal.  Buying more server space to give spammers more room to screw me hasn’t even worked – the more server I buy, the more these arseholes clap their evil little hands and rejoice in the increased room they have to slam this space with comments.  I feel like someone started dumping their garbage on my property, and I have had no choice but to hire a team of people to lug it away for months now – and it’s finally time to build an electric fence.   I don’t mind paying to manage my own trash, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to have an ever escalating budget line for cleaning up after jerks.

With a little luck the new geeks will get this figured, and the comments should only be down for a day or two.  You might notice other weirdness on the blog as well, a natural byproduct of them stirring up the insides of the place.  Just avert your eyes. This should be over quickly.