Star Trek Fan Fiction » Blog

SPAM Will Get You Blocked

dtremel — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 05:29:38 +0000

I usually check the site everyday to see if anyone/thing made it through the spam filter. This week, one post made it through. I did not find it till today. All should be good now.

Thanks to everyone for continuing to visit the site. Here is to our 17th year on the web!

Spammers ruin it for everyone!

dtremel — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 15:27:56 +0000

I stopped paying attention for a day and Google came around to declare the site as spam! Many of you have probably seen the warning. I can assure you that the site never hosted any malware, badware or spam. After some investigation I traced the problem to approx. 5,000 tags that were not associated with posts. Those had to have been left over from the spam posts that I cleaned up in December.

I have no idea why Google decided to look at those now and declare them bad. Any way… I’ve cleaned the problem up and things should be back to normal within a few hours.

Downtime

dtremel — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:34:17 +0000

Sorry for the downtime this morning. I forgot to renew the domain name and it expired. The problem is now solved and the site is back in business.

Spam-a-palooza

dtremel — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 03:52:31 +0000

I’ve learned a lesson. Don’t forget about existing sites while working on new ones. Turns out, the site was polluted with SPAM while I wasn’t watching. I’ve solved that problem by deleting the offending users and all of the posted content. Other features have also been implemented to prevent spam from being posted.

If anyone sees any SPAM posts that I may have missed please email submissions@trekfanfiction.net or post a message to the feedback link on the left side of the site.

Thanks!

What’s New

dtremel — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 02:19:34 +0000

The relaunch of Trek Fan Fiction has been long over due. After 16 years on the web, it was really time to bring the site in to the future.

This version of the site is based on WordPress and as of this writing is running version 3.2. I know what you’re thinking, if this is an all new version of the site, why does this look like the old version of the site? Well, I had to take a few shortcuts in order to get everything done in the amount of time I had given myself. I do have some ideas on what else to do with the site. Unfortunately, those changes will have to wait.

Why WordPress? The simple version is that it was the easiest thing to work with. It already has a well designed user interface and all of the plugins needed to make this work. I could have done something else, but why reinvent the wheel.

User submissions are the wave of the future. I’ve known for a long time that I am the weak link in the site. Sending stories to me which I would then post on the site just didn’t work. Allowing users to submit, edit and control their own content was the way to go. This does have a few drawbacks but I figure I’ll have happier authors if they can control things on their own. The user community should also be much more interactive.

As part of making the site more interactive there is a new Feedback Forum. The link is on the left side of every page on the site. Use it, tell us what you think. Make suggestions. Ask questions.

That’s it for now.

Thanks all!

-Dave