Arg!

It had to happen eventually, didn’t it? It looks like RAWRtacular.com has come under it’s first attack.

‘Attack? You mean hackers?’ You may ask, but you would be wrong. I’d like to think that hackers are more likely to come here to read the comics than attack the site itself. No, today’s attack I’m referring to is a Spam attack, the scurge of web-masters and users alike.

Over the past week, I have noticed a massive increase in the amount of Spam Comments coming in, as well a huge increase in hit traffic. It seems that some Betting websites have been Hotlinking my site.

Needless to say, I’m slightly not very happy at all with this. You see, thanks to the Spam Comments, I had to install CAPTCHA. To post a comment, you’ll now have to enter the charaters you see in an image box. I’m really sorry about that, I know that users fill in enought of these as it is, but please trust me when I say that the spam comments were starting to become a major problem.

Secondly, and more worryingly…in the past few days hit traffic to RAWRtacular has nearly tripled. ‘So? Isn’t that really good?’ You may say. Yea…I thought so too at first. Hell…I was nearly jumping around in joy when I saw the traffic stats. That was until I found out where most of that traffic came from. Over half of it came from a couple of betting websites. After checking these sites, I found that they contained no links to my sites what so ever. Hmmm…it was weird.

After doing some homework on this, I learned that this could have been down to Hotlinking. The result of which could seriously effect RAWRtacular’s standing in search engines. Thus I’ve now taken measures against this.

This may however present problems to readers who wish to link my content into their own site. To those people, I merely ask that you contact me. Normal hyperlinks should work ok, but please let me know if you encounter any problems.

-Rawr