Am I the only one who keeps having trouble getting my pings to go through to Comic Weblogs Updates? I'm pinging, but was somehow removed for a few days, then put back on, then dissapeared again. All the usual suspects seem to be updating, but I'm missing. Even the older entry vanishes. The spam is sneaking in though.
I blame Yahoo tweaking blo.gs.
Monday, October 10, 2005
Comic Weblogs updates
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I'm getting that as well. It's almost as if Comic Weblog has lost some of the urls it's supposed to be checking for. I've emailed them asking about it.
ReplyDeleteYeah, last week they told me mine dissapeared. I emailed them again but no response yet.
ReplyDeleteHmmm. If I understand the faq right, the Update site has to link to your blog to have it show, but spam like "search/condeleezza_rice.html" gets in. i don't know enough about codes/programming/internet to know how it really works, but are the spam url's somehow eclipsing/replacing the authorized ones that ping?
ReplyDeleteIs that something that is happening through Yahoo's "improvements"?
-- but are the spam url's somehow eclipsing/replacing
ReplyDelete-- the authorized ones that ping?
That's certainly what seems to be happening. Somewhere, a server is holding a list (either in a text file or a database) of urls to be checked. It won't be a private machine held by weblogs, because their machine would have to be running twenty-four hours a day to do the hourly updates. So they upload their urls to a server (maybe with blo.gs, but it could also be a third party server, I don't know). This server has a security weakness, a spammer finds it and uses it to replace one or two urls. Our sites are recent additions, so this seems to be a criterion for replacement. If the spammer replaces too many urls, their work would be instantly detected and deleted. That's actually clever spamming, if you can describe a spammer as something other than "scum".
In which case weblogs may not be able to do anything about it other than to tell whoever holds their server that they have a gross security hole. If the security hole is actually someone naughty at their company giving away passwords, it may not get fixed at all.