Splogs have become a hot topic lately and has started getting some good media attention. Today morning, I was skimming through "The Hindu", I stumbled upon an article titled - "Splogs" , the curse of blogging community. Nothing new, just the definition of splogs and a basic outline. But then I was surprised to see something, a reference to splogspot.com

The guardian
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,16376,1643774,00.html

IndiaTimes
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1301530,prtpage-1.cms

The Hindu
http://hindu.com/2005/11/28/stories/2005112803931400.htm
(Surprisingly, their site looks spammy, but its a leading newspaper Offline)

Its interesting to see how spammers change their style and method of spamming. Today I came across a 'poker' blog (on blogspot.com, obviously). I was surprised to see 10 comments on a post. Even though I knew those comments were spam for sure, I just clicked out of curiousity. To my surprise, what I saw was an evolved form of comment spamming. The comments looked so genuine. If it weren't for a hyperlink in that comment, I would never come to know that it was spam. Similarly, all the comments on that page looked SO real. Quite astounding.

Checkout the raw copy of the page attached.

Not so good news. I am (hesitantly) going to put a very small ad unit on the Pingoat homepage inorder to raise some funds (I hope it helps). If it works out well, the ad will be removed after a month or so. I would like to hear your views on this "action" (If you find the ad annoying, I'll happily get rid of it)

Misc:
> focuslook.com added to the ping list.
> Splogspot now has around .1 million spam blogs in its database.


Update - 25 Nov 2005
Well, nothing is working out. No revenue, no funds

Good news. Pingoat has been moved to a new clean server and is fully functional as before. Sorry to those whose blacklist related emails/forum posts were not answered during the down time. They will be dealt with at the earliest.

Thank you all for your cooperation.

Finally, a good and powerful server (stable) where Pingoat can live and play peacefully. Thanks to Advantage Consulting Services - http://acsseo.com for the server.

So now, Pingoat is being moved to the new server. It might take a few hours before the migration completes. You MIGHT experience certain technical problems in this process. I'll post an update once the transfer is completely done.

Ok, things just got worse. Pingoat is dying. The server is choking to death. Please immediately contact me at kailash.nadh@gmail.com if you can offer help in anyway. It wouldnt be more than a few days before the whole server collapses :| So please do offer a helping hand if possible. URGENT

Great. the server has started choking again. Firewalls aren't working properly and guess what, a couple of rootkits and trojans have been planted on the server! The CPU is on maximum load every second and so is the memory.

Is there anyone who could donate Pingoat some good computing power (in return for credits) ? Pingoat currently runs on a dedicated server, but its already become a huge mess. To clean the server, the OS will have to be reinstalled and that costs quite some doughnuts

Anyone willing to sponsor some dedicated hosting or something? ( You can always drop me a mail - kailash@pingoat.com )

For about three days, Pingoat has been experiencing critical technical issues as the DoS attacks continued to hit hard. And to make things worse, I was out of town and never actually got time to get online, so I never knew what was happening. Apparently, the database somehow got corrupted during the attack.

Anyway, things are Ok and running smooth now. I'll be keeping an eye on the server 24x7, so hope we get no more performance issues.

I apologise for the inconvenience caused. Sorry.