Webmaster

We have made some changes to the signup system to avoid spammers.   In order to sign up you will need a valid e-mail address.   We will only be accepting email address ending with “.com, .org, .net” and other well known top level domains such as gmail.com.uk or yahoo.com.ca.

The reason for the tighting of the restrictions is to eliminate spam signup ups.   You will also have to validate your e-mail address before having the ability to blog and use other features.

If you do not have a valid e-mail address contact us and we can set you up a full service shootingsportsblog.com e-mail address free of charge.

Shooting Sports Blog has been attacked by the Japanese. Over the past few weeks Visitors from Japan have overwhelmingly been coming to Shooting Sports Blog.

The only problem is that these visitors have consistently been mischievous and malicious in their visits by spamming.   Spam Blogs (often called splogs) spam comments, and free blog signup fraud.

Due to the malicious intent of these visits and attacks we have blocked all visitors from Japan.   We hated to do this because there are many good visitors and shooting sports enthusiast from Japan.   We hope the denied access is temporary.   The implementation of the block has been in place for a few days and malicious attacks have dropped to “0″.   The combination of blocking all visitors from Japan and the deployment of Monty Spam a month ago have curved malious attacks to almost zero.   For the time being the changes will remain in place.

Since Feburary 1, 2009 Japanese traffic makes up 0.09% of Shooting Sports Blog visitors.

Over the weekend we received several successful attempts of spam bloggers to promote viciously a Dish Network type of product. The attack was thwarted and the persons have been band. The ip address that were the culprits of the attack have been banned.

We have taken some new measures into place that will hopefully alleviate future problems and to maintain the integrity of ShootingSportsBlog.com.

If your account was removed you can resubmit for another blog as yours may have been banded for show of malicious content within you blog. It an account was suspended this may have been caused incidentally. We apologize for the hassle it has caused you. We are trying to protect the integrity of the community.

For additional questions or information contact the webmasters.

In follow up due to the intermitten outages over the last few days we have included some security fixes on the back end and on the front end.

The back end updates are a bunch of technical jargon that really isn’t necessary to detail.   The front end changes are a not the most user friendly in nature.   The problems over the past few days were caused by malicious spammers.   To combat spammers we have installed everyone’s favorite CAPTCHA forms.   reCAPTCHA forms will only appear for unregistered users and visitors.

Visitors, unregistered users, and users not logged in will be required to copy the text of an image correctly before submitting data to Shooting Sports Blog forms.