Oh. I almost forget how to blog after 8 days – almost the longest pause in the history of three years. Let me explain what happened in the last 8 days.

Ipowerweb, the hosting company

First of all, I’d like to thank ipowerweb for hosting my site since April 03, 2004. The migration to ipowerweb was very painful, so did everytime I talk with them, but I have to say, the hosting experience was not bad – they only experienced very few server down, and for the rest, it is fast and smooth. But whenever customer service is needed, it will be exteremely bad experience for me.

Dec 13, 2005

On Dec 13 (U.S. Pacific Time, and shown as Dec 14 in my blog), my site was suspended by the abuse department. The reason is, they found there are phishing content on my website – which is comment posted by my readers, known as comment spams. There are too much comment spams on my site – that according to the log, every hour, there are at least 20 comments or trackback spam attack for this blog, 24 hours a day, and 365 days a year. So I used blacklist to filter the spams, and added almost 3900 banned words and URLs that frequently appeared in comment bodies.

Even so, there are still huge amount of comment spams appearing on my site, as many of you may see everyday. It was my job to delete everyone of them – about 4 – 5 everyday.

Despite of all the effort, currently, there are still some spams out of the exisitng 13351 comments. Among them, at least one was phishing content that ask people to send their account information to them. That is the factor that triggered the abuse department of ipowerweb, so they suspended my account.

Nightmare to work with ipowerweb

I just want to skip the days to work with them. As a experienced person in customer service industry (particular the years in Microsoft global customer service organization), I would rate the response from ipowerweb was very unprofessional. Of cause, I also don’t think I behaved as a professional customer after the site went down for three days and there is still no one I can talk with. :-(

Finally, it is up

Since all the data were destroyed, I managed to pulled out the data from database, and reconstructed the site. Thanks God that I still know some technical stuff.

There are one challenages after the other, like the DNS replication delay, the domain names, the large file (35M MySQL backup) importing, and file uploading.

During the process, I upgraded to MovableType 2.66 to MovableType 3.2. I kept the resistance to update, because I want to spend time more on content instead of technical stuff – I am that type guy who enjoys geek happiness. If I had spent time to improve the system, I will found myself deeply dive into the technical details, even to create a lot of plugins without writing anything, like my friend Hacky did before.

Sign…

It is interesting that comment spams are my enemy, and it is also the enemy of ipowerweb, and finally, it turned out that I became their enemy to get rid of.

The more interesting things are with the Great Fire Wall in China. Since I banned some spamers, and they happened to be on the ban list of the great censorship machine. As a result, I was not able to view anything in the blacklist tool before. It is the same.

Nightmare may continue

Be prepared that this site may experience further problems in the next few days. Several hours after the site was moved to another server, the site went down again. This time, I suspect to be because the great fire wall of China. People in some companies started to have problems to access the site, and then ADSL users. People in Beijing can still access, but I suspect they will not be able to view the site soon. Recently, the ICP requirements for blogs are greatly strengthed. My friends are complaining that their servers’ network cable are unplugged frequently because of not having recording with MII. The possibility to be shutdown for the site is now a real threat for me.