Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Winning And Losing

It appears my experiment with Blogster may have ground to an abrupt halt. Like Blogstream before it, the site owner isn't making enough money to satisfy himself and is reluctant to spend on upgrades. Sometime overnight, there was a hardware failure which has taken the site offline I guess. All the volunteer "Blogster Team" can say is that there is a hardware failure and that "Tony" has been notified. Something temporary is being used with limited functionality, except the server still doesn't answer queries so functionality is more like 0 than limited.

I'm not really sure this is a bad thing. There are people there who seem to want to fight all the time. I guess that's the downside of "social media". It's not a bad blogsite, it does focus on social blogging as opposed to educational/opinion blogging. There is a very vocal, nasty bunch of Conservative nut jobs there that tend to want to rule the roost. If one wants to put forth an opinion that is more liberal, one will find oneself in a rather messy situation.

It became so bad that 18 or so fellow bloggers moved to a forum cum blogsite as a way to get away from the vitriol. I looked at the site and wasn't interested and that means I will lose contact with some of the bloggers I've met there. Possibly not a bad thing. A couple of them are over here in Blogger. I have found one of them, but the other is still lost in the Blogger vacuum.

I've never defined my style of blogging since it isn't for me always about my opinion of something. Sometimes it's a diary that I don't choose to keep private. While I can find those willing to interact on my political posts, I've not been lucky here finding the social bloggers. Maybe my fault, I don't know. This place isn't friendly the way both Blogstream and Blogster were/are but at the same time it also isn't full of drama mamas.

I can't say I'm back because I don't know that I am, and besides, who but the spammers ever leave comments here? You all do realize that thanks to the spammers my page views grew by leaps and bounds? When I left in march I think I had somewhere around 50,000 page views after 3 years as an actual in use blog. Without posting a single thing, I managed, in a few short months to triple that number and OMG, you should see the number of spam comments I need to go delete.

That might be a full time job right there. As near as I can tell the comments are almost all on just one post. I'm thinking that if I delete that post the spamming might stop? I hate to do that but if I'm going to post here, I need to do something about the spammers. I can't shoot them, so I'll try deleting the post and see if that stops the onslaught. I'm getting around 4000 spam comments a month on that post. I'm just a popular blogger I am, I am.