The Trouble With Turkbots

You may have noticed a severe lack of new postings on "the Tubes," as my co-workers have begun to call this blog. The Tubes' writer has noticed this trend, too. I can assure you that I have two excuses I intend to employ: The firewall went up killing the blogs and I have had writer's block.

I shall now explain each to it's fullest.

The trouble began two weeks ago the day after my last entry. On Friday afternoon chronline.com was hacked by a PHP exploit that we were able to fix fairly quickly. I believe the hacked page was online for around a total of a minute-and-a-half. Take that, hacker! Turns out these hackers, these Turkish Hackers, are usually just robots from Turkey surfing the net and looking for PHP exploits.

I always imagined hacking as kind of a hobby for some people. If you get a robot to do it, what is the point? It's like watching a game of soccer where both teams are robots with no affiliation. Could it possibly get any more boring than that? Only if you replaced the word "soccer" with "sitting on the couch".

Jon quickly surmised a solution to these Turkbots by implementing the firewall to block Turkey. We somehow felt worried about blocking an entire nation of people from being able to access our website until we realized there are about fourteen computers in Turkey (all being used to run Turkbots as far as we know) and that none of them probably is too concerned about the events happening in Lewis County, Washington State, United States of America, North America, Western Hemisphere.

I could be wrong, but I somehow doubt it.

With the firewall up, however, we didn't realize the folly in being able to post blogs until a few days later when our co-workers attempted to update their own. That was an easy fix, however, by simply allowing the Blogger Software to connect to our server through the firewall. Once we added that (and Blogger, knowing this was a common issue, made it easy for us), everything was hunky-dory.

Well, except that I had the flu. Influenza does a strange thing to a person; once you're done retching and feeling as if you're slipping into infinity or that strange monsters are surrounding you, you're left in the recovery feeling very unmotivated. I spent most of last week and the beginning of this week in a stupor. And as soon as I was done with my bout of illness, my daughter and pregnant wife both came down with it. They're both feeling better now, but the Pierce Household has been a proverbial wasteland of illness for some number of days.

I didn't stop coming up with topics to write about during my absence, though. Looking back now, I'm almost glad I couldn't convince my fingers to type because the topics I did come up with are somewhat... lame. Here's what I had:

Anonymous, an anonymous group on the internet (shock!) has declared war on the Church of Scientology; not over their religious practice but over the ways the Church has dealt with dissenters and critics. I'm remaining fairly neutral on the issue, saying that everyone should have religious freedom. But Anonymous does make a point.

Voting for the caucus is the 9th (Saturday). You probably already know this.

Standards Compliance coding is fun, but extremely difficult. I've decided I'm going to stick to Transitional for at least another year. At least this time when I tried, I was able to build an entire Standards site until I needed to actually include content. One step closer, I suppose.

The Buzz is alive and doing well as we ramp-up towards the political season. I've decided that it would be best for me to leave my opinion out as much as possible, but feel that I can still post links to Snopes when some stupid e-mail gets circulated as fact. We're still waiting for vBulletin 3.7 to be released officially and then I will start undergoing the process of upgrading.

What's The Buzz? I Got You King 5!

I was shocked today when Michael came up to me and told me that Patti Prouty, the Patti Prouty, had registered to the Lewis County Buzz. I remember coming up with a list of individuals I'd hope to eventually see on the Buzz when we began it. Patti was definitely one of those on the list along with King Chuck (who is also a registered member). I'm still holding out for Jim Hamilton.

Admittedly I didn't know who any of these people were before I moved down here. Possibly I should have paid more attention; as it was, my attention was focused primarily on what I was going to eat that night. I suppose in a way it still is. Either way, the idea of creating a forum that existed for the newspaper and outside of its entity at the same time was one of the first things I lobbied for as soon as I came on. I have been happily rewarded with a fun and thriving community to watch over, not as a Chronicle employee, but as another member of the thousands of discussions that are occurring.

There have been tirades and hissy-fits, for sure: It's just to be expected on a forum. I would be surprised if there aren't others in the future. We recently lost our top-posting member because of a disagreement over a vulgar post. These things happen. Whereas those might seem like more pressing matters of a forum, I think the community is better evaluated on the many levels its helped unify our county virtually.

We got to learn about our county's past from older members of the community. The Peterson vs. Lawler campaign was opened up for everyone to see. When the flood hit, our community worked together enabling hundreds the ability to post where help was needed, how to provide it, and the current situation when all other options seemed lost. And that's all within three months since the forum began. Nine months from now, in September, I may look back on the entire year the Buzz has been through and be able to name off many more "accomplishments" of the community I'm proud of. A week ago we passed the 1,000 registered member's mark.

And one of them is Dennis Bounds.

Dennis Bounds: Not A Stalker

He called me last week, but I was out of the office and he was forced to leave a message. He must have begun talking before the beep sounded because he was in mid-sentence when I played it back. I believe it had something to do with my expressed opinion and something about "polls." I can't honestly be sure. He didn't leave a number to return his call. Note to Dennis: Wait for the beep and leave your number. Yes, I'd be happy to come on your news program and give my opinion on your "polls." No, I will not press one at the tone.

Since that time I've noticed several stories on King 5 after returning home from work that appeared to have been pilfered from the Buzz. The last straw came last night, hours after having closed and deleted a thread about a Centralia High School student who reportedly attended a dance intoxicated on Tilt. The article as it appeared on King 5? That's right: The dangers of teenagers getting drunk on alcoholic energy drinks!

The story was then immediately followed up by a cat being rescued from a tree.

Am I calling Dennis Bounds a stalker? No, mostly because I believe that's a form of libel and I think I can get in trouble for that. But Dennis, let me just say this: I'm on to you.