A Really Bad Neighborhood
Is this a neighborhood you would want to live, work, or play in?
Imagine living in bad neighborhood; a really bad neighborhood. A neighborhood where nothing is sacred or respected. One where every single day various miscreants visit your home, business, church, club, bar, every place and any place you call yours. When they visit, without even considering whether you’re present or not, they jiggle your doorknobs and rattle your windows, testing your security, verifying you’ve locked up. And if you didn’t, even if the doggie door is ajar, they will enter your place and destroy what you own claiming it as their own or simply taking it away from you. They will rob you blind, rape your dog, raid your fridge, kill your houseplants, and flatten the tires of your car. Every day, all day, all the time.
Is this a neighborhood you would want to live, work, or play in? Probably not, but we do it. Not in the metaphorical sense, the neighborhood is real. It’s the Internet.
Rant over.
matthijs responds:
Posted: July 27th, 2006 at 2:26 am →
So true. Funny, I didn’t think about the Internet until you specifically mentioned it.. Well, that places the problems I have in my (real) neighbourhood in a different perspective. Even though it’s not exactly the best place.
Dave Z. responds:
Posted: July 27th, 2006 at 6:12 am →
Interesting analogy…sounds like there might be more to this story. Did your neighborhood suffer an influx of these hooligans lately, Mike? If so, care to share the “Rest of the Story”?
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: July 27th, 2006 at 8:11 am →
Not really. No different than what I’ve seen over the years. Some people run access scripts and all sorts of crap looking for servers to exploit so they can send out spam at someone else’s expense, or they’re looking for data to steal and then sell. The usual it’s sad to say. Error logs and access logs tell the whole story. I would imagine it’s no different for anyone. Check the logs and you’ll see things that just shouldn’t be. Look out the window and see the hundreds of footprints in the mud.
JackP responds:
Posted: July 28th, 2006 at 9:00 am →
I installed the bad behaviour plug in for wordpress and found my site traffic dropped by about 30%. In a good way: all the nice, well behaved bots were getting through; all the browser-users were getting through but a lot of the bad boy webcrawlers were being binned. Probably not all of them, but lots. I’d recommend taking a look if you’ve not done so already. There’s a link to it on my footer, where it tells you how many bots it’s blocked in the last 7 days. In the first week, it took out about 95, so it seems that I’m getting less return traffic too…
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: July 28th, 2006 at 9:50 am →
Thanks for the tip Jack. I will. Does it stop spammy trackbacks? I deifintely get sick of all the spam posts. Most are held in moderation and are so easily identifiable (a post with a 100 links etc) it’s not much of a bother, but trackbacks are a pain. I don’t how somebody like Zeldman is going to deal, now that he accepts comments if I get bombarded so much. I suppose we’ll be seeing something like that on his footer soon enough.
JackP responds:
Posted: July 31st, 2006 at 8:15 am →
It is designed to guard against trackbacks. How effective it is, I don’t know as I’m getting nowhere near the volume of traffic you get. I’ve not had any trackback spam, but I didn’t get any anyway in the 3 or 4 days between switching my site to WordPress and installing Bad Behavior.
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: July 31st, 2006 at 8:50 am →
Thanks Jack,
I have installed it on my SeaBeast theme. I can’t here unless I do a few things due to versioning. I ended up contacting them for support and when I finally got a response I was sort of blown away how snotty and impolite my contact was. We went round and round a few volleys as his answers were very short and incomplete. And rude. I was amazed. I was going to donate money to them for the use on SeaBeast, but the person who offered me so-called support was such a [beep] he talked me right out of that. I was disappointed to say the least.
JackP responds:
Posted: July 31st, 2006 at 11:35 am →
That’s a shame. If you take the trouble to stop and be nice to people (and I know you do), then they’re normally nice back. And everyone gets along just fine and dandy.
It’s at times like this, I wish I’d listened to what my old granny used to say.
asks: so what did your old granny used to say?
I don’t know - I just told you I wasn’t listening
…cue groans from the audience.
Varsha responds:
Posted: August 6th, 2006 at 4:49 am →
oh….well written…wonderful imagination.
Kinda scary concept though!
WebtrafficJunkie responds:
Posted: August 10th, 2006 at 3:30 pm →
What an eye opener! I never really thought of the internet like that, but it is definitely true!! It is too easy to just pretend that the internet is always safe, but that is definitley not the case. Thanks for the wake up call!