It’s been four days since the deployment and we’ve been live for two. So how are things? Not too bad. We’re having problems with analytics and spiders finding us, but that’s expected. Changing DNS makes spiders pretty angry at the best of times. I’m just glad that Shelob isn’t after me – it’s not like I have an Elven Sword or Starlight.
Right now, things are reasonably stable. No reports of problems have come my way and backups are being taken without problems. I can take the backup and Git can tell me what changed between versions – a big plus if you have to manage content as a database. Although the ECLIPSE compare engine takes a long time even on an i7 because the MySQL snapshot is so massive. Git compare tools might be better here.
Our one annoyance? Spambots. Yes, they caught up with us moments after the DNS switch happened. Fortunately, we are able to block posts. We have a large number of fake users that I have already deleted – hopefully I did not remove anyone real. Don’t worry, our editors won’t blindly delete users with posts so even if we accidentally delete a real user, the posts will be kept (or at least reviewed first for spam). We’re researching how to prevent the initial registration, but that’s a harder problem than catching actual spam posts.
More tomorrow on a really cool idea one of my sons had for learning about disaster management training.
If anyone is interested in the source for a lot of this, the outlook.com domain is being used for most (and I mean more than 50%, not by a little) spambot accounts. Fascinating. While I am entirely sure that Microsoft has nothing to do with the spam – I’m not blaming them – it is a shame that they are being used for this purpose. One would think that legal action on their part would help.