Site downtime, never-ending spam, and planning
Posted in Tales from the grind-stone on March 30th, 2007 by MrCrankyAnnoyingly, the site was down for several hours this morning, putting a major crimp in my efficient mood this morning. Apparently Dreamhost are having (yet more) woes with their NFS servers. Still, all is well now.
Yet more spam in the Akismet box though – it makes me wonder how there is value in those things, and just how much money the people sending the spam (or at least the people paying to have the spam sent) are actually getting back in for it. I’m still thinking that the Internet will have to go the way of the micro-transaction as the only way of getting rid of the spam. By which I mean, having an account through which you pay some pittance of an amount to send emails and/or post comments on blogs. Some amount small enough that an average person will hardly notice (like 0.1p per post), but that makes the sending of millions of emails/comments more costly than it’s worth.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder if it would be tricky to set up a site/plug-in that manages a system like that. Say 10000 free comments/emails a month, but you have to register and log-in to post/send. Anything more and you have to enter credit card details to unlock unlimited posting, and are billed at some fractional rate. Get buy-in from the ISP’s so that people automatically get an account with their ISP so they don’t have to register manually. It would have to be nicely integrated, and you’d have to persuade site owners to set it up… Anyway, enough distractions.
Planning for our 3 month project is pretty much settled for now, we should be signing agreements soon and getting cracking on the work. It’s a big pile of stuff, but I’m confident we can manage it – as long as the development kits turn up in a reasonable time!