Redneck Bar & Grill

Boy do we love comments. We read ‘em all. Unfortunately, the spam comments outweigh the real comments by a huge margin. We’re talkin’, 3900 real approved comments, for 62,000 spam comments we flushed down the drain. I decided to up the ante a little. Threw down the gauntlet. Made a stand. Bit the hand that fed me spam. After the hack attack we received recently, I’m gonna be more vigilant all around.
So commenters, welcome! Here are our new comment rules. They are a little stringent, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Here’s the basics, just in case for some reason you haven’t followed the link above.

1. Comment moderation is gonna be on full time. If you leave a comment and you can’t see it yet, that’s because we haven’t approved it yet. And since we might be busy running our bar or saving the world or running for Prime Minister of Canada, we might not approve it for a few hours. Sorry bout that, I don’t like it either.
2. Comments should be funny or thoughtful or further the discussion. Feel free to make your comment all three things. I mean it, I am really done with comments like “nice post” or “good article”. If you have nothing to say, say nothing.
3. Keywords are allowed. We’ve got this handy dandy Keyword Luv plugin and we want you to go nuts with it. Use it right and you get a link with your keyword. I want to see your name, and then your keyword, like this: Sandy@Cement Flooring or James@Handy Widgets. If your name isn’t first, then you’re outa here! Delete!
4. If for some reason there is a link in your comment, then delete! We are already giving away a link to your site. Don’t be a jacka$$. Putting links in comments is lowlife behavior, unless somehow it will further the conversation with a relevant link to something which will not profit you in any way. No one has ever bothered including a link like that in one of the comments on this site, so I’m not expecting one in the future, but we might spot it in moderation and let one like that through.
5. Sucking up might help. Treat us nice and you might get by even if you aren’t clever, funny or relevant.
6. If something about a comment seems off, like it was made by a script or robot, theen we will dump it just in case. Sorry about that. Try not to act like a robot and you should be fine.
7. If you are one of our Beer Buddies, then you will get a free “in”. Everyone else has to follow the rules.

You might notice, if you have ever visited the Trade Show Guru, that his comment policy is a lot like this. You might guess that I copied Steve’s comment rules, and you would be right. Thanks, Steve!

Sometimes it takes a little thing like someone hacking your site and taking over to wake a guy up from inertia.

I haven’t been around the Redneck much, what with my lousy internet connections, long hours at work away from home, and plain ‘ole burnout. Maybe a little bit of mid life crisis and a spiritual awakening, mixed in with spending as much time as possible with my children and helping out with the aging parents. Top it off with a few possible business ventures and it all adds up to Tim being too busy to breath, let alone surf the net or even keep up with the dang email.

Ernie has been slugging away though, as best he can. There have been some spam issues, but things were getting out of hand. We have had over 61 000 spam now, a lot of those manually deleted. And then the inevitable happened. Someone hacked us. That’s right, even a bar way out in the sticks by Horseguard River isn’t safe from hackers.

I came back to the Redneck Bar and Grill at night, after dark. What the?!! Who put up those banner ads?! We don’t advertise stuff like that here…. I tried to get in but the locks were all changed and my password didn’t work. I asked WordPress to email me a new password. Nada. Then I quietly freaked out while I tried to remember what to do.

Fortunately, I have had a few words with My SQuirreL Database before. I made a new password hash, got the back door unlocked and went to survey the damage inside.

So far I can’t find too much obvious tampering inside. I had all the locks changed, then hunkered down to make more fresh backups and (shudder) upgrade the WordPress installation. Just like before, I lit incence and made a magic circle on the floor, then chanted arcane words in a long dead forgotten language. Apparently that makes a WordPress Upgrade go smoothly. Then I reverted to an old template I found lying around on my desktop, upgraded all of my plugins and deleted a few of the dinosaurs, ate a Mars bar and tried to relax.

I’m thinking we got incredibly lucky. Not only could this hacker have corrupted all of our files or deleted them, he (or she) could have drank all the Blue Beaver Beer. Or swiped the cash drawer float. Or rummaged about in Ernie’s kitchen. Or stole our bar sound system. All they did was lock me out and throw up a few banner ads. I mean really, lame banner ads? Come on!

But that’s it. I’ve had it with spammers, hackers and internet lowlifes. I’m gonna make a few changes around here and try to clean the joint up. All those losers have been scaring our regulars away from the bar and sad to say, but the dofollow might have to be a lot harder to get. That’s right, youse gonna hafta earn yore links, suckas! Ill be posting our new comment rules real darn soon.