Website Parasites

 

 

Over the past few days, Shook E-Commerce has been under siege by what we will fondly refer to as the plague of the slimy website parasites.  It all began innocently enough one Monday morning when the inbox used for the website, started filling with 50, and then 75 comments. Starting a web business? Be warned and ready.

 

My first reaction was joy. People are paying attention to me! When I returned from my day job 300-400 more had come in. Could the new web host have been this effective? Then after careful examination of these, “please moderate messages”, my heart sank. They all seemed to have generated from 2or 3 ip addresses.

 

The dirty nasty slimy plague of the website parasites starts this way for unsuspecting websites. All internet based business opportunity must know how to defeat this plague.

 

Yours could be next!

 

How is this plague contained?

 

Once this starts follow these steps.

 

 

1) Go to your website and shut off e-mail notification of messages needing moderation unless you want to clean the 2000 or so that I collected in three days out of your box. About the only advantage I can see in saving them is that the e-mail did give me knowledge of the whois information. This gave me knowledge of two large companies who own ranges of ip addresses and spammed shook E-Commerce with large amounts of website parasites.

 

2) To Black List:

Using wordpress you may black list; ip addresses, a range of ip addresses, or words.

In the comment editing section go to Settings/Discussion/Comment Blacklist then put one entry per line in. Always click save changes.

 

3) Cleaning up website parasites:

Blacklisted comments go straight to the spam folder.

 

One can clean that folder with one click and the parasites are gone from your site.

 

One can also edit the comments and then approve them as clean comments for your site.

 

Always edit out the url that tries to sell or redirect traffic from your site.

 

Edit out the e-mail, which is usually bogus in a spam comments.

 

Edit the comment any way you want.

 

Edit the name to your liking. Be certain the name contains no url.

 

Either update the comment as approved to the website, or approve it as pending then reply to it as you desire.

Remember, always read urls and ip addresses first.

 

 

 

William Shook