There are essentially two results from this activity. You find your new follower interesting and decide to follow them too. Or, you don’t find them interesting (or worse, Twitter spam) and you decide not to follow; maybe even block them if they are nefarious.


Well, this all seems fine and dandy. But, wait… there is another result. A few days after you decide to follow your follower who initiated the relationship you find that they have already abandoned you. Why would they do this? Well, it could be that you got offensive in some way on your Tweets. But, if you have not said anything remotely offensive, why would they just leave? Easy, they were baiting you… like an angler (“fisherman” for the uninitiated). That’s right, its a little game called “catch and release”.

I guess it works for some people. You might catch people who don’t pay much attention to their followers. Or some may genuinely like that guy or gal’s tweets; so they stay. But I find it particularly disingenuous and phony. It says to me “Don’t Trust Me, I’m A Loser! Don’t Do Business With Me, I Can’t Be Trusted”.

So follow me if you like my Tweets, don’t follow me if you don’t; but don’t bait me, catch me and then release me. As my teenage kids would say, “that’s gay”.

I had hard time finding a clear answer on this, but here is the solution I found that works.

This is for a typical Linux web server. I don’t know about IIS

***WARNING – This really does get rid of your website. So be sure you want to do this.

1. Backup your site (if you want to).

2. Completely delete all files from your web root. (via ftp or ssh) This includes any databases or applications like WordPress. If you have server access and the ability to terminate the account, do that. Then recreate a new account on the same domain with nothing on the web.

3.Create or update a robot.txt file with the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

4. Update your .htaccess file with the following

Redirect 410 /

(get rid of all else in the .htaccess).

5. Upload the robots.txt and .htaccess to the web server.

The result of this is that robots cannot index your site. There’s nothing there anyway but this tells them to go away and don’t come back. The 410 error is “GONE” – the resource is intentionally and permanently removed. This will speed up the process of search engines removing content from their index.

It may still take several weeks or months for your site to be gone… gone.. gone. But eventually, it will be.

For Google’s SE algorithm “age of domain” definitely plays a role in determining what shows up at the top. But, aging content?  Hey… the things change especially in fast-paced areas like SEO, web design and other web related stuff. An article from 4 years ago is rarely relevant to now.

There has been talk about filtering older content somehow, so now (of course) I see a trend of people leaving the date of publication off their blogs. That’s just stupid. What possible reason would you want to hide this from your real human visitors. Do you want to trick them? Are you afraid that Google will depreciate your website because the content on it is old? So lets hide the date, or better yet change the date to a more current date so Google won’t hurt us! Really not smart. People who come to your site will get annoyed by your old info and even more so by you masking the actual date it was written.

Here’s a little secret… The search engines know when your content was first indexed no matter what you do with the date on your site. Changing or hiding it only does so for the human users of your site. So.. the whole idea is dumb.

So, I hope there is a filter to start archiving the old crap and showing me more recent info first. Websites just need to keep their content fresh and purge out their old out-dated garbage. The web would be a better place.

However, these letters imply that I might, and therefore if I sign here and send a check there, my domains won’t expire. What is really going on is they are trying to get me to transfer my domain registration to them.. without being directly explicit about it.

In my opinion, this is nothing more than a trick played on the ignorant. There may be nothing illegal about such tactics, but then again there is nothing illegal about relieving yourself on the kitchen floor, but that doesn’t make it right. I believe this to be an unethical tactic to trick unsuspecting people into transferring their domains to this registrar. It is a marketing tactic which plays on the ignorance of the public, and that says a lot about a company who engages in such practices… doesn’t it?

You be the judge. Google search “ Domain Registry of America” – nothing but negative. Why would anyone sign up with them unless they were tricked? I guess it’s their business model.

It works like this… visitor completes legitimate registration form. Like many these days the last field is a CAPTCHA code where the visitor has to read the distorted characters and enter them into the field in order to submit the form. Now, many people are wise and un-check those check boxes that ask if you want to receive this company’s spam… eh hmm.. “special deals and offers”… or whatever.

So, visitor un-checks all the opt-in boxes so they don’t get on any spam list. But when they submit the form, they get the CAPTCHA code wrong! And have to do it again. On the second try, the visitor gets so focused on getting the code right they don’t even notice that the newsletter and ‘receive marketing emails’ boxes are checked again on the page reload. They enter the code a second time and bam…Gotcha! The visitor as been tricked by a deliberately failed CAPTCHA trick to induce them into opt-in marketing.

“pre-tty snea-ky sis’

Maybe I was just paranoid, but I started to notice this happening a lot. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention and got the code wrong more often than I should. So, I looked into it and I am convinced it is a deliberate trick. I find it to be ridiculous and unethical. I am going to continue to test the theory to see who is definitely doing it and begin to list the evil websites I find that are tricking people this way..

This is real slime ball stuff and should not be tolerated. That’s what I think anyway.

Safe Handling Instructions.

After some checking I determined the email to be real. That is not to say the email you get is the real thing as yours could be a ploy made to look like this exact email. I have determined the safe way of handling this. Here goes…

1. Do not click the link.

2. Instead, go directly to Twitter.com

3. Type in your username and password

4. If it fails (which it will if the email was real), click on the “forgot” link

5. Enter your email and click “Send Instructions”

6. You will get an email in a short time with the link to reset your password.

7. Click that link and reset your password.

This method ensures that you are dealing with Twitter.com and not some phishing ploy. It is slower than clicking on the first email, but this way YOU KNOW you generated the email for the reset, and do not need to trust some random email allegedly from Twitter.

Or… you can just click the link in the first email and hope for the best!

IMHO

*******************************************************************

The body of the email:

Hey there.

Due to concern that your account may have been compromised in a phishing attack that took place off-Twitter, your password was reset. Please create a new password by opening this link in your browser:

http://twitter.com/account/password_reset?email=corewebsolutions@gmail.com&token=114469c2aed674b1a2514e2e496ce6e7-1271373406-agent

This will reset your password. Remember to choose a strong password that is a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols. Do not reuse your old password.

As a reminder, you should be extraordinarily suspicious of any third party that offers to artificially inflate your follower count. We do not endorse any of these sites.

Please make sure to:

• Scan your computers for viruses / malware, especially if unauthorized tweets continue to be posted in your accounts even after you’ve changed the password.
• Check the Connections page at http://twitter.com/account/connections and revoke the access privileges of any third party applications that you do not recognize.
• Avoid providing your username and/or e-mail and password to untrusted third-party sites.
• Remove any updates that you did not post personally.

You can also visit our help page for hacked or compromised accounts

The Twitter Team

Please do not reply to this message; it was sent from an unmonitored email address. This message is a service email related to your use of Twitter. For general inquiries or to request support with your Twitter account, please visit us at Twitter Support.

I have always been reluctant to add CAPTCHA to anything since it is over used and very annoying sometimes, but I get the point. It is supposed to stop automated bots from dumping their spam into web forms. Some work well, some don’t. The main problem is that it is almost always an inconvenience to the innocent users, having to type in some distorted characters just to send the form. If they get it wrong, the form may clear, or partially clear, and they have to re-enter information and try again. After about two tries, if they still get it wrong, they will probably leave.

This works differently. It is a cooperative plugin with “Akismet”, the standard anti-spam plugin that comes with every WordPress installation. Basically, if Akismet thinks that the comment being submitted is spam, it brings up a CAPTCHA form and asks the user to enter the code. I actually use the re-CAPTCHA version which is a whole other story. Anyway, if they pass the test, the comment goes through and still can be moderated. If they fail, the comment is discarded… end of story. The best part is that if the comment is legitimate, which Akismet determines quite accurately, the real person does not have to deal with the CAPTCHA at all. They just submit the comment. This is truly fantastic in my opinion.

The system keeps a running tab of how many spam comments it has blocked using this gadget. So far, the one site I have it set up on has blocked 45 spam comments in the past 4 days. I have zero spam comments in my queue and only legit comments have come through. Does it get any better?

The plugin can be found here. You will need to get an account with re-CAPTCHA and download some keys to get it work best. But I recommend this to anyone. This post is actually a pure unsolicited recommendation. I get no compensation for writing or linking to this. So, take it for what its worth.

related article: http://www.the42ndestate.com/comment-captcha-fail/

Check it out…