Oddverse.com

I've tried it. I don't like it.

Four times now, I have accidentally rendered the site unusable. And why?

Spam!

I could cope with comment spam. I could just about manage trackback spam, which I did by deleting the script. But now I'm tackling referrer spam.

Referrer spam is bloody annoying because it appears to be utterly pointless. All it means is that my number of hits goes through the roof, and the hits appear to come from gambling sites. And I get a link back to that gambling site appearing in my stats, which don't get indexed by any search engine.

I'm tackling it. I am. My new-found enthusiasm for the site is too strong to be ruined by the junk-mail spam-meisters. But I can't do anything direct to express this, unlike my ongoing conversation with the world's worst telephone salesmen, so I'm blocking them. One site at a time.

Now this is a techy thing. And I'm not very good at techy things. So I accidentally make mistakes. And that's why I've made my site unusable. Four times.

I might just end up grinning and bearing it. Or I might change domain again. But they won't win. Sorry for any inconvenience. And if anything else goes wrong, I will make a sound like a dying giraffe.

Update, Friday Morning

I've made another change - this one seems not to have caused the web server to vanish, and might be more flexible. Hurrah for the holy internet.

I had to re-edit this post, though, because it originally contained a reference to a word I've now banned. Cool.