Dear ShoutPost Users: I suppose it's time for an update...  First off... We DO care. Rocky and I have invested tens of thousands of dollars into ShoutPost and tBlog, not to mention thousands of hours of our time. Rocky is very busy with his work and I am very busy with my other business ventures. These sites are currently big money losers for us, and we have a really hard time putting paid work on hold to fix every little issue that crops up (we need to pay the bills somehow). Major issues (such as server problems) get immediate attention, minor issues often get put on the back burner. The server has been heavily loaded for the past couple days, and I've been doing my utmost to keep it under control. Spammers are obviously part of the problem and are very tough to combat. I hate to admit it, but those spammers are crafty little pests (I have much nastier words for them, but I'm trying to keep this clean). They spoof and randomly change their ips, and they ultimately find a way around anything that we put in place to curb their complete disregard for other people. I just deleted over 8,000 spamments. False Positives (spam filter): The spam filter HAS been quite helpful when it comes to automatically flagging spam posts. We are aware that it does incorrectly flag legitimate posts from time to time, but do not have the the resources to monitor the situation. If you have posts that are incorrectly flagged as spam, please message me and I'll do my best to unflag them for you. Comment Spam: I think this is our biggest unresolved problem right now. It was a problem for us at tBlog, and continues to be a problem for us here. Yesterday I turned off all commenting in order to slow the spam down; you will need to turn commenting back on from the settings page (if so desired). Besides preventing comments altogether, we're not quite sure how to stop the comment spam at this time (this is an Internet-wide problem btw). NetFlix Ads: Some of you have obviously noticed the new Netflix ads on the main site. We'll be testing these ads (as well as others) in an attempt to replace the revenues lost when both Adsense and Fastclick cancelled our accounts (at nearly the same time) due to our inability to control the content that their ads appeared next to... If you can believe that! At any rate, we still don't plan to run any advertising on your blogs/subdomains, but we do need to find ways monetize the main site as much as possible to cover the cost of the ShoutPost/tBlog servers. And fast...! Well, I think that covers it for now. Take care...! Nick |
