Blogging | Mommy Ramblings

What a stressful week it has been. Discovering our blog was hacked 2 weeks ago when we got what is called the “white screen of death” which matched the color of my face, was bad enough. The wonderful tech support from my server had me thinking we cleaned any back doors from being entered again, but I found out this week, that was not the case. I had to put a lockdown on brute force attacks and then resurrect my poor blog. I now know that the security I have in place will not allow brute force attacks and also let me ban countries where most of these mechanical bot hackers were coming from.

I don’t understand why any time is wasted hacking a “mommy blog.” Is it just to make the moms crazy or is it for some other reason? I wish someone would enlighten me because I don’t have my credit card numbers or bank account info anywhere on my blog. Absolutely baffling, but worse than that is all the time I lost having to spend days to get everything back up and running. It also occurred at the worst time of the year since sponsors are really in a time crunch and losing days getting holiday gift guide products up is unacceptable.

I however, feel empowered now and the new security installed alerts me right away and bans the user ip of anyone trying to guess the password to log on. Beyond that we have added a telephone code that changes every 30 minutes to the password so they would literally have to come and steal my phone now to have a chance at logging on. All the malicious code they hid on my site has been detected and erased. I look at the reports each day and smile, our spam has been reduced 1000 fold, declining log on attempts are reported since we banned countries and the hackers ip addresses. I almost was physically ill looking at the log on attempts to my blog, It made me scared but then turned to anger and finally to action, putting the plan in place to lock them out for good. Now, I feel great about the security of my site.

I know you all had difficulty leaving comments or not being able to bring the blog up while we were in maintenance mode and I thank you for you patience. I am scrambling to catch up but have some awesome giveaways to put up this weekend so please stay tuned. We also are behind drawing winners and we will get to that too!

Thanks again for sticking around, I truly appreciate it.

I love being a blogger, but there are some things that really suck. That’s when you realize people have either been cheating in their entries or other bloggers are doing unscrupulous things. That is when I become very irritated. I thought I had seen it all; but every day I am privy to even more underhanded tactics that taint what I do, the fabulous people I have come to know and the PR reps and sponsoring companies who so generously host these reviews and giveaways.

I know many will say one person cannot make a difference but, I will certainly try. If you frequent blog giveaways you may have noticed a new trend in the blogging community. That trend is that many bloggers are promoting the same giveaway on their pages. Why would they do this? They do it for inflated stats that have nothing to do with their blog, their writing, their reviews or giveaways, but are the result of riding on the coat tails of a blogger with good stats and a good following.

These giveaways make you like as many as 100 or more Facebook pages and follow the same number on Twitter and Pinterest, subscribe to the blog newsletters and more. All the bloggers either pay for a spot or promote the giveaway earning them one free link and pay for additional links. Confused yet? The Facebook pages that a person must like are often arranged 25 to a page and the entrant must like every one, if one is not liked, they will not receive credit.

The other thing they do, is that certain entries can count as multiple entries in an effort to drive up their number of entries. For instance a blogger may say that following them on twitter counts for 25 entries, this way they get 25 entries for one small task. Why is all this done you may be asking. It is all done in order to gain blog subscribers, Facebook fans, Twitter followers, Pinterest followers, and to boost the number of entries on their giveaways.

Why is this important? Well, it is important to them because they believe that PR reps and sponsoring companies will be impressed by the inflated stats and send them enormous review items like washers , dryers, kitchen appliances, etc. Sad truth is they have been getting away with it for a while now. They are not about blogging anymore, not about content, many of them post nothing but these joint giveaways of 100 or more bloggers together for even the smallest giveaway prizes. It hurts the people entering the giveaways because when bloggers wrote their own reviews and did individual giveaways there were more for them to enter and the amount of entries were not in the tens of thousands.

These bloggers that are doing this now are making the chances for an entrant similar to being struck by lighting with the number of entries zooming up in the hundreds of thousands. When does it end? Well, more and more bloggers who truly care about their craft and the integrity of their blog are speaking out. PR companies are being alerted of these inflated stats that do not mean a thing because many of the giveaways are entered by “sweepers” who will enter for any product and either sell on ebay or hoard. They are not a representation of followers and probably have never even followed the blog prior to them having to like it for an entry.

More ugly things happening, are brand new bloggers do not put dates on their blog posts to make it look like they have been blogging longer. Another sneaky and underhanded tactic is that many unscrupulous, new bloggers are taking on the name of a very popular blog and sending that blog’s stats to the PR companies. For instance, let’s say there is a blog that is very popular called “Rambling Mommy” a newbie will create a blog called “A Rambling Mommy” or Rambling Mommie” etc and when the PR companies ask for their social media accounts and followers they submit that blogger’s stats. See? They already have their blog loaded with reviews of products that they have in their house, big group giveaways and no dates so they look like this big time blogger.

If you see a new blogger suddenly getting sponsors that we as bloggers know require much hoop jumping, you can be rest assured that something fishy is going on. The last ugly thing for now is about bloggers rigging Rafflecopter giveaways so that their immediate family members are winning the “big” giveaways. These are on the independent giveaways but, it is more than obvious. It really disgusts me, can you tell? I for one will not be running any of these multi giveaways on my blog and I do not rig my giveaways. I would love to start a coalition of bloggers who feel the same and want to create a society of true bloggers with integrity. If you are interested in banding together with me on this please contact me at carolyn@mommyramblings.org or use our contact form. Our giveaway rules can be found HERE!