Spam
The last post on my FruitfulDetours WordPress site
[Author’s note] I’ve moved to Substack. This post just gives a little context for those who are interested in the history of this blog.
I am constantly surprised by how much spam this little blog attracts. Every week, I get signups like sxfgyukkltt@mycrazywebsite.com. Then I have to go in and manually take them out of my email list, or I get dinged by my email provider for having a high undelivered rate. At the same time, my website hosting company (a totally separate entity) sends me hundreds of emails about “site lockout notifications” every week.
They look like this:
[https://fruitfuldetours.com] Site Lockout Notification]
User login lockout events had occurred due to too many failed login attempts or invalid username:
Username: bearvox-com
IP address: 2804:7f0:9703:897827:f3ee:5613:3baac8:8f3b
Org: AS1889781 TELEFÔNICA BRASIL S.A
AS: AS1889781 TELEFÔNICA BRASIL S.A
Log into your site WordPress administration panel to see the duration of the lockout or to unlock the user.
These are all hacking attempts, trying to get control of my website. The last time I looked, I had 312 of these attempts in the past week. Most of these attempts are performed by bots — small computer programs that spend all day and all night trying to find a vulnerable website and take it over. Every week, I erase hundreds of these notifications. One of my sites did get hacked once. It took me weeks of working with my hosting company to straighten things out.
As you might imagine, I’m tired of all this. Fed up, even. So I’ve decided to do something about it. I’m going to move fruitfuldetours to a new platform. I’m still working out the details, but you will see some changes. The new platform will most likely be a paid service, but if you are on my mailing list already, you will keep receiving my posts for free.
I enjoy writing these posts. If nothing else, writing them helps me to clarify my own thinking. I’m hoping that this move will reduce some of the difficulties involved in putting it together.
