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.

12 comments:

  1. I sent you an email to help you with the Spam problem.

    I picked up some readers by promoting my blog on G+ , but as you know I have moved for the time being and am not promoting it now.

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    1. I found it thanks to your help. No captcha, just not allowing anonymous comments. I still have 4000 or so of them to delete. *sigh*

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  2. Sherry,
    I concur with what you have written about Blogster. I did meet several decent folks and caught up with a handful of former Blogstreamers, but there is/was that right wing hit squad running around and some of their targets descended to the same juvenile levels. Somebody here usurped my "Corner" throne and I'm not sure I can get it back. Haven't had a blog here for several months anyway, so .... Good luck with the spammers and if I do start another blog, I'll try to get around and let folks know. So far I have seen Scratch and Bella back here. Fringe never left., nor did Not a Cynic. I'm not sure about anybody else.

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    1. If it does continue as a blogsite, I'm going to post in both places. Scratch has a place in SU, but that's not really a blogsite, it's a forum and dear old nasty firesbreath is hitting as hard as he can over there. I will not EVER go there.

      Hope to catch you someplace, I value your friendship and sense of humor. Us NY staters need to stick together, even if you do live in NZ. LOL

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  3. Blogster has had issues before, it gets old. :(

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    1. Well, we wanted the Blogstream experience, and we got it, friends, fights and equipment breakdowns. *sigh*

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  4. Hi Sherry. I alternate between open access and forcing the anti-robot code type thingy, which everyone hates, therefore I change it from time to time. Then I delete spams ASAP. It works pretty good, I have had a steady decline.

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    1. I'm trying Open ID and so far it seems to have resolved some of my problem. They still seem to be driving up my pageviews, but they can't leave spammy anonymous comments in my spam folder lol

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  5. Sherry,
    Just dropping in to say howdy...Sorry about the blogster problems. I miss the Stream...haven't been nearly as active on Blogger. Ah well...life goes on.

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    1. There's advantages to Blogger if someone didn't have the experience of Blogstream membership. Blogster should have that kind of connection, but it doesn't. There's too much paranoia there. It's weird.

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  6. Sherry, I am confused. Are you leaving Blogspot for Blogster?

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    1. Not really leaving Ron, just posting more there than I do here. I have met a few people who are fun, and they tend to comment more there than they do here. I get to do boring life posts and people actually talk to me. LOL

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