As some of you may have already noticed, fellow ODP editor Neil Turner‘s (aka totalxsive) blog is currently offline. I was aware he was having problems with people spamming his comments (I could tell by reading comments people had left that there were a couple of rather immature people with too much time on their hands) – but it seems it escalated into a flood attack resulting in his ISP (Freedom2Surf) taking the site offline – he’s tried contacting them, but no response after 36 hours! I’m disappointed if I (or another member of our technical team) don’t respond to a technical queries on website hosting business within 6 hours (that’s 6 hours full stop – not just “working hours”, after all – the internet doesn’t close down at 5pm, so why should your site?)
Neil’s currently looking for alternative hosting (I’ve recommended our hosting service as I know how good the tech support is and how reliable the servers are – I would move my own sites to them, but I’m a massive bandwidth hog and use up around 1.5Gb of traffic a week – that’s around 6Gb a month – on my various sites and I’m expecting that to return to normal levels of around 2-3Gb per week after the Iraqi war finishes).
Anyway, Neil’s got people looking to trace the person that spammed his account (and, yep, if whoever you are is reading this – Neil DOES know where you live and is contacting the relevant people), but has said in an email to me > Only downer is that I’ve probably lost a whole bulk of entries – my last backup was about a month ago <
Whether Neil will be bringing back his blog (which is one of the few that started me on my blogging adventure) at the same URL or reference to him as an individual, I don’t know, but whoever caused him this inconvenience lacks basic netiquette and intelligence – if you’ve got nothing nice to say, don’t say it at all!
Hopefully Neil should be back at the weekend…