I don’t know quite where it started from. I think a lot of people found out about it from this post in Ezra Klein’s Washington Post blog:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/…

That wasn’t the first mention of it though. It was mentioned by various people on Twitter, but the oldest mention I found was this one on a computer gaming forum called NeoGAF. And the most recent was probably this one on Inside Gaming (found via Josh Wein on the Critical Miss Facebook page).

I’ve just checked out the server logs today, and it seems that while things have quietened down quite a bit, there is still a good trickle of people coming in: in August, that one article’s had 15,646 views. To put that in context, in June, the highest rating article was one about “Semi-Sentient Bipedal Pack Animals” with 310 views, with the entire site itself getting 2073 unique visitors (which is itself not bad considering that the site hasn’t been updated for more than five years).

I don’t think this article going viral’s likely to make much difference to me in the long term. Most people coming to read it will be coming simply to read an article someone’s linked to. They’ll probably not even notice the site it’s on, let alone who wrote it. (Although if anyone is reading this having found me via this article, I’d love it if you could let me know).

So what does it look like when a post goes viral? Well a bit like this:

And this:

Bugger.

…I still havent anything to say.

But I do have a new WordPress client app on my iPhone to test.

And thats pretty much it. But Ill add a random photo.
pa href=http://jonnynexus.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/p_1600_1200_2DDF23B7-998C-4978-91D7-4C8C0D9C36C5.jpegimg src=http://jonnynexus.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/p_1600_1200_2DDF23B7-998C-4978-91D7-4C8C0D9C36C5.jpeg alt= width=225 height=300 class=alignnone size-full wp-image-364 //a/p

(Except, of course, that it’s managed to raise my hatred of spammers from its already incandescent level to a white hot level of biblical fury. I’m regretting being an atheist, because it means these scumbags won’t go to hell. I hope they accidentally spam Osama Bin Laden with porn and then get taken out by an Al Qaida suicide squad. I’ve moved way beyond the point where I hope they come down with particularly painful cases of rheumatoid arthritis, and instead want them to stay flexible enough that I might one day read of them accidently choking to death on their own genitals during a solo sex session. I no-longer agree with Barak Obama’s shutdown of Guantanamo Bay and his abandonment of torture. Sure, I’ve previously said that the Western world needs to maintain the moral high ground, but that was when we were talking about suspected international terrorists, for God’s sake! I have no problem whatsoever with the CIA kidnapping spammers off whatever rat-infested streets they might happen to be inhabiting, extraordinarily renditioning them to Camp X-Ray, and giving them a damn good dose of water-boarding.)

Anyway… On Friday evening, I whipped out my iPhone and tried to show my site to Martin, a guy who might be taking over Tales of the Decongested, and found that I got a page saying: “This site has been suspended. If you are the administrator of this site you should contact either our support or billing departments as soon as possible.”

This was not fine, however loosely you define that word.

Of course, by then it was past Friday 5 pm, and UK2 (my hosts) are strictly a Monday to Friday outfit when it comes to support for basic hosting. If they’d given me the basic curtsey of sending me an email that afternoon to tell me they’d just turned my sodding website off, I could have phoned them before the support lines shutdown. (Note: the host account’s registered email account is not with them, so even if everything in the account was turned off, they still could have emailed me). But no, they left me to find out myself, and by then it was too late.

So I had no option but to spend the weekend periodically checking the site to see if it had come back, finding the message there each time. It’s not a nice message. “Suspended” is a dodgy sounding word, which could cover everything from “This man doesn’t pay his bills” to “this man has been distributing Nazi propaganda” to something far, far worse. Alright, it’s not like coming home to find the word “pedo” scrawled across your door, as I believe once happened to a paediatrician who made the mistake of living on a housing estate populated by illiterate vigilantes. But it’s still not very nice.

About the only good thing about the situation was that it was only the website they’d turned off; my email was still working.

So first thing Monday morning, hoping it was just some kind of direct debit snafu, I phoned up the billing department, and was bluntly informed that my website had been “banned” by the “abuse team” for “abuse” and no, they couldn’t tell me what it was. The only thing I could do was go to the support section of the website and create a support “trouble ticket”. Which I did.

Hi there,

Some time on Friday, my website (jonny-nexus.com) stopped being available. There was just a message saying that it was unavailable due to being suspended and that the owner should contact either the billing or support department.

I phoned billing this morning, and they said that it had been banned due to some kind of abuse issue (spam etc).

I’m a bit mystified by this as I never done any kind of spamming whatsoever, my website is very harmless, and I’m using your mail server for mail (i.e. it can’t be one of those cases where spammers are using a misconfigured server).

The only thing I could possibly think it might be is that I recently installed a WordPress blog (using your install script) and I’m getting a lot of really horrible spam comments. They’re being caught by the spam filter, so they don’t go on the blog, but I have to log into the admin page to delete them – so perhaps one of your systems saw the WordPress admin page with the spam comments on it being sent out to me, and that tripped some kind of alarm.

The page I would be looking at is (from memory) something like:

http://www.jonnynexus.com/wp-admin.php

Anything on that is just stuff that I’m seeing, having logged in as admin.

Obviously, I want to get my site up and running asap. If you can sort out what’s going on and get back to me I’d be very grateful. You can email me on the above email address or call me on 07954 589313.

Thanks,

Jonny

I then sat back and waited for a response, which – and this will be no surprise to anyone who’s ever googled the words “UK2″ and “Complaints” – didn’t come.

First thing Tuesday morning, I phoned the support line, quoted my trouble ticket reference, and was told that only the system-admins could deal with this sort of thing. I said that at this point, I just wanted to know why I was banned. (It’s not a very nice feeling. You wonder if someone’s been doing something awful in your name, and you might get into trouble for it.)

But the guy on the phone line could only apologise, saying that the only thing he could do was ramp the priority of the trouble ticket right up, and then email the sysadmins to ask them to respond. I asked him to do that, and waited for a response.

4pm, seven hours later, that response still hadn’t come. I phoned again, three times, and couldn’t get through. I tried again at 4:40pm, and this time did get through, and got the same non-answer. By this time I was really wound up. Forget getting my website back up and running; I just wanted someone to tell me what it was I was supposed to have done. The guy promised to go over to the sysadmins right there and then and ask them to email me with an explanation, and said I would have something in 10 minutes.

Well it wasn’t 10 minutes, it was nearer 30, but lo and behold, the following popped into my inbox, around 96 hours (and three phone calls) after they took my site down without even bothering to tell me.

Hi Jonny.

Please accept my apologies for delay in getting back to you. We have received large amount of spam via your account and as your disk quota has been reached, random message we picked up looked like was sent from your account. We have unlocked your account and it should be online shortly. Please accept my apologies for any inconvenience.

Kind regards

XXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX
Server Engineer

UK2 IT

Ticket: www.uk2.net/submit_ticket

At UK2 we promise to bend over backwards to help you! www.uk2.net/webendoverbackwards

I have no idea what that means. Really. I understand the words, but not the way they’ve been put together. John suggested that perhaps someone out there at Server A was sending a stream of dodgy emails to Server B with my address put in as the return address so Server B was sending response emails to UK2′s server and that was what caused the problem – but in that case, surely it would have been my mail they’d taken down not my server?

And what’s all this stuff about disk quota? There’s hardly anything on my site. I’m probably using about 1% of my disk quota. About the only thing you can discern from the mail is that there was nothing wrong with my site and it was taken down in error due to some kind of false positive. But without knowing what that false positive was, I can’t take any actions to prevent it happening again.

At the end of the day, I’m pretty unhappy with this. The idea that they might take down my site (in error!), not tell me, and then – when I contact them – refuse to do anything more than confirm that yes, they’ve taken down my site – well it’s not good.

Needless to say, I won’t be recommending them. The standard signature tacked onto the end of the email stated:

At UK2 we promise to bend over backwards to help you!

Well someone got bent over backwards last Friday afternoon, but I’m not sure it was them.

This isn’t the post that ends the “Great Jonny Nexus Blog Rethink of 2009″. Think of it more as a John the Baptist to that post’s Jesus. I’m still thinking about what sort of things I want to blog about. But since I’ve now got Live Journal to switch the feed from the Blogger blog I was planning on doing to the WordPress blog I’ve ended up doing, and as a result you’ve all received a bunch of test messages, I figured I ought to post something.

Following MatGB’s advice, I’ve switched to WordPress. I’m very impressed with this software. It feels solid, it’s easy to work with, and has a killer feature that’s pretty much made it for me – as well as the blog page itself, you can create “static” pages, thus allowing you to use WordPress to build your entire site, and not just the blog.

If you go to http://www.jonnynexus.com you’ll see what I mean.

I haven’t done any work on the look and feel as yet, so it’s all very drab, but I’ve got most of my initial content in, so it’s a working site. I’ll try and jazz it up a bit over the weekend. (It has themes that you can then customise).

I only created the site two days ago, but I already have my first comments, which was another factor behind me breaking cover with this post. One was from MatGB himself, who I guess was signed up to the feed. The other was a spammer, whose entire post (hyperlinks removed) consisted of the following:

eKZjq5 fsxpgtzcsjyp, vyvrwynwbiuz, oamedffhplck,

I’m genuinely not quite sure what he was trying to say, and rather horrifed that it only took two days for this blog to be picked up by spambots. What is nice though is that the WordPress software must have some kind of anti-spam protection built in, because while most posts go straight through, this one was detected as potential spam and held back for moderation. (I got an email alerting me about it).

It’s a strange world.

Not sure if anyone is going to get this, but if you do, treat it as a Londoner would treat an unconscious man he found lying on a tube station late one night. (i.e. Ignore it).

Can everyone hear me at the back?

Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow. And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.