BACKUPS: If any of you have tried to log on to my website in the past 24 hours and noticed a bunch of gobbledy-gook on my site, you'll know that even well-managed sites can crash. In this case, it doesn't appear to be the work of malicious attackers or even a virus, it was just a corrupt database. Several tables were corrupted, much in the same way that random holes may appear in your clothes, or unidentified bruises on your legs. It's just one of those things that happens. Thankfully with technology, we can create automated scripts to make backups of databases and files on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. It's not something you typically think about until you need it. As a professional, I've needed it enough that I set all my clients' sites and databases to backup frequently.
CAPTCHA: You've seen them, although you may not know what they're called. Captchas are those codes of random numbers and letters, typically in a distorted font that are difficult to read; the user must enter the corresponding letters and numbers into a form field before the form can be submitted. If you try to post a comment to this blog, you'll see one of these at the end of the form. The concept is that a human can interpret the letters and numbers, but a computer cannot. In my case, this was a very good thing! In the past 24 hours, I've had 59 attempts from "bots" to spam my site comments, and the captcha form stopped every one of them. Looking further back through the logs, it looks like my site receives this amount of attempts each day.
Spammers write computer scripts that search websites and automatically submit their spam message to any form they can find, such as email forms and comments. They include links in the spam message that link back to their sites, thus convincing Google that your site links to theirs and consequently increases their page ranking in the search engine. Good for them, bad for you because you end up with all sorts of male enhancement ads on your site. If you receive these spam messages via email from your website or on your website in the form of comments, ask your webmaster to install a captcha form!
