LS Blogs, the blog directory and search engines very own blog.

The queue is now down to under eight thousand, even new ones are coming in every day, I am managing to accept blogs *and* remove dead wood from the directory.

For example, yesterday I ran a admin tool to check the blogspot blogs that had been submitted, and found over 100 that were dead (as in deleted, giving a 404 message on blogspot).

Its not really as simple as that, as I have to manually check each one, as sometimes false 404’s get reported, but if it fails the auto-check, and also the manual check, then its gone.

Thats one hundred dead ones removed from the directory in one swoop, cleaning up the categories, search results, and also getting the queue down a little more (as un-approved ones are also checked).

The new server is still going strong, even under load, its hardly breaking into a sweat.
Its still early days, a year or two on this server will be a really good test as to the longer term reliablity

I have temporarily turned off the forum, due to the amount of spammers signing up (and not posting!)

It appears they were doing it for the link in their profile, which was pointless, as I removed them all a while ago, but spammers are a little stupid….

I will leave it disable for a while, they may give up. In the meantime, I think I will look into just deleting the existing forum, installing a brand new version, and integrating it so only people with accepted blogs can post, that means the memberlist would consist of people already in lsblogs, no more dual sign up required.

I have a few ideas, well loads actually, its just finding time to do any of them!

Blog comments were disabled for a while due to the amount of spam arriving.

A continuous amount of spam comments were arriving, so I turned it off till a captcha was put in place. Hopefully that should stop the majority, and allow only genuine comments.

Turns out there has been another glitch with the move, I was wondering why the submissions suddenly stopped dead… For some reason one of the fields in the database had switched of it’s Autoincrement - and defaulted to 0… Meaning no new blogs could be successfully submitted.
Its meant a drop in submissions for a couple of days, but its all sorted now.

I am trying to get rid of as many of the ‘decaying’ blogs as possible, I found a lot of blogs that were now dead, or redirecting, lost count, but I would say at least a few hundred removed now - and a lot more will follow!
Im semi-automating the process, but its a longer term thing, as time permits. It may mean that occasionally a blog gets deleted by accident, if that happens just drop me a line in the forum and I can look into it. Due to the sheer number of spammers who submitted blogs, and change requests I have not been able to cross reference every change request with every dead blog, so its possible one or two may have gone that should still be in.

If yours is one of them, let me know in the forum.

I have deleted all the screenshots that were requested to be changed, and they are now in the queue for recreation, so dont worry if your screenshot is not present, it will correct itself when it gets regenerated.

As for getting rid of the decay, the usual reasons for a blog going are,

It has been deleted.

It has been redirected to a different site (not the same blog)

Its now a parked domain.

Its crashed - or the posts have been removed

It has not been updated for years, and there is little content.

You can still keep submitting, I have the blog queue down to about 9400 blogs now, so still a long to go BUT if your blog meets the criteria, it will get shown in time.

Actually, I quite like having the long queue, its has a nice side effect in that a lot of the blogs set up for a spam purposes, or with little effort dont last long and will be dead, or showing there true colours by the time I get round to check them.

Turns out it was a mysql bug with a left join, just needed to use brackets around it.

Well documented, and a easy fix

Now to test everything else!

The move to the new server has gone well,  the site is running a lot faster now

Today, I updated the server with newer versions of apache, mysql and php, the upgrade went smoothly, but there are a few teething problems.

One of those is the search facility, its not showing any results, I am going to look into it later today, as it looks like I need to tweak a couple of things for use with the newer version of php.

As for blogs, I have got the queue down by a few hundred blogs (still over 9.5 thousand to go!) and also managed to weed out rather a lot of ‘dead’ blogs.

I will continue to weed out blogs that have died, or are redirecting to non-blog sites in order to keep the listings as useful and accurate as possible.

My first priority in the short term is to sort out any teething problems with the latest update, then its back to getting that queue down!

Thanks for your patience!

Sorry for the delays in approving blogs, been extremely busy recently, lots of things getting in the road of checking the site,

but Im back on it now, the queue is over 10 THOUSAND blogs, so I am going to be rather busy!

Now some good news, Im trying out some better hosting, its more expensive, but hopefully will be a lot faster.

Im slowly migrating the site over to it, starting today with the database - lets see how it goes!

After a recent communication from google where they indicated a problem on my adsense account, it appears there *may*, and I repeat MAY in my opinion (and that of others on the net by the looks of it) be a problem with using blog traffic exchange sites (not lsblogs, but blog traffic exchange sites) if you use adsense.

I have asked google for clarification on this matter, but they refuse to state any details other than

“It is against our programme policies for website publishers to click on
the ads on their own web pages or to encourage others to do so. Note that
some programmes including, but not limited to, auto-surf, pay-to-surf,
pay-to-read or pay-to-click services may provide incentives for generating traffic resulting in invalid clicks or impressions”

Now as I dont click my own ads, or offer incentives, nor pay people to click then the only thing left is traffic exchanges targetted to blogs, it appears this may be where the problem lies.
I asked them specifically if it was, but they wont tell me if it is, I guess they think people are capable of reading there minds.

I am writing to let you know that you should review your adsense policies, if you are using adsense on your blog and also a member of blog traffic sites. As far as I know I was not aware there was any problem, and cannot yet get google to comment on this matter.

Hopefully in time, we will find out the true situation, but if anyone else gets problems like this, I would appreciate it if you post in the forum so we can see the extent of the issue.

I cant see why google should have a problem, as any traffic on a blog exchange is targetted, but time will tell. In the meantime, I have disabled my blogs on the exchange I normally use to avoid further problems with google.

If anyone out there finds out more information, please let us know!

Despite the large amount of blogs accepted, the queue is now around the four thousand blog mark, so it will take some time for new blogs to be accepted.

Thankfully (in one sense) many submissions will be rejected, as spam, so not all the blogs need checking fully.

The forum also suffered from spam recently, so I have mass deleted hundreds of posts and upgraded the software whilst doing so. I *may* upgrade again soon, so holding back on tidying up the forum until I decide.

I have been quite busy accepting/rejecting blogs recently, trying to get the queue down to a reasonable size, its currently down to just under a couple of thousand blogs waiting to be checked. Apologies for it taking longer than normal for blogs to be accepted, but the queue is very large. Your turn will come in time.

I have been unable to check the change requests for a while, but will be back on top of that when I get the queue down a bit more, so it looks like there is plenty of fresh content guaranteed for quite some time.