Caught In The Act Via Pmetrics

About a week or two ago, I happened to be browsing around Pmetrics for Performancing checking out the stats and of course, spending some time monitoring the Spy feature. Good thing to as I caught a spammer in the act. Refer to the screenshot to see what I mean.

The screenshot reads best when read from the bottom up. I noticed that the IP address had a registered account and was editing a page they had created on the Performancing website. Administer this site long enough and it becomes pretty easy to spot something out of the ordinary. A post title of “Professional Details” screams out spammy to me. Sure enough, you can see that my IP address (173.#.#.#) visits the users profile page. I then block the users account while they are editing the details. When that user clicked on the save button, they received an Access Denied error because I blocked their account. I admit, it felt pretty satisfying and humorous at the same time to actually nail a spammer in real-time.

Unfortunately, the feeling of making progress was short lived as a couple more spammers signed up for accounts on the site. As it stands, Performancing.com is in a bad position right now because the site contains hundreds of user accounts which have public profiles showcasing either spam or pornographic material. Just the other day, I deleted 10 pages worth of users and I didn’t even put a dent in the situation. I’ve discussed this with J Angelo Racoma and we are working on at the very least, getting the site to the point where we can turn user registration off but because the Performancing.com database is linked with Pmetrics, disabling one disables the other. A quick lesson to be learned here is this, really think things through (longterm) before you decide to link databases together.

As part of the revamp of Performancing, I believe most, if not all of the user accounts stored in the Performancing.com database will be removed. At least, that is how I understand it. The bottom line is, if you type into Google a certain set of keywords or phrases that are usually published by spammers and your site comes in with not one, but many hits and they are public user profile pages, it’s safe to say that you have a problem.

As we transition Performancing.com, there are a number of things that are worth sharing that I believe many within the audience would benefit from. In the coming days, weeks during the transition, I’ll be highlighting specific changes that will be taking place and the reasons behind them. After all, sharing the experiences of administering/running a multi authored is a great way to learn.

Pmetrics

Ok, back to the subject at hand. I wanted to let you know that pMetrics is a web statistics package that gives bloggers and web site owners a deeper look at traffic and visitor activity. It comes with a sparkly-clean and simple interface, live, real-time statistics and search keyword and keyphrase tracking. As far as blog stats and web site statistics packages go, pMetrics is unrivaled. Packages for the service start at just $2.99 per month however, Pmetrics does contain a free plan. All new accounts get a free 21 day trial of the pro service so head on over to pmetrics.performancing.com to sign up for your account.