Every few months, the hackers and spammers switch off teaching me a new lesson with my site. This latest lesson, should have been avoided, but it fell between the cracks.
My site is a little bigger than "small". That means, it has about 50-100 pages, areas, and locations of consideration. One of the areas is what I term, the
Crystal Community. Its not much of a community if you ask me, but I keep it up because it provides a place for me to post articles once in awhile.
Unfortunately, that 'once in awhile' turned into about a 6 month lull. However, during those 6 months, the spammers were nice enough to keep the community company.
You see, I had left the "commenting system" on for each article, poll and message area. I figured that if I turned off the anonymous setting, forcing people to type in names and e-mails, it would discourage spammers. Apparently not. They visited every 2-3 days during my 6-month lull. That totaled between 20-30 spams per article, poll and message area. My guess is there were over 400 in all, and most were quite large.
It didn't take too long to remove them (considering the duration it took to put them in), but the damage had been done. About a month or two ago I watched my main page fall from PR5 to PR4. Go figure. All those pages were PR2, where they should have been PR3s or PR4s. I fully believe and expect my main site will come back up to a PR5, but I won't be holding my breath on how soon to recovery.
I can say, another lesson learned. At least it was a lighter lesson than learning the robots.txt file has nothing to do with security, and when you install a template-based database system, move the configuration file! But those are two stories for another thread.
Moral of the story? I'm an idiot. But a more memorable moral is to browse your "entire" site, no matter how big or small, every couple weeks at least. Set a reminder in your electronic calendar. Just go through the pages and make sure everything is the way it should be.
Browsing Your Own Site / Commenting Systems
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