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If you tried to visit my blog this morning, you may have faced problems. That’s because I was facing problems.

Well first of all, my blog’s been under attack from spambots for a very long time. They edit my scripts and insert spam code in them that redirects to some phishy website. Most of you may have experienced this. I have been changing my server file and folder permissions for a long time but they manage to edit my .htaccess file and rechange the permissions to suit themselves. The result is the return of spam within a few weeks, if not a couple of days. So I contacted my hosting to ask them how it was happening and they told me it was a vulnerability in my script, not from their side. Even my other sites that don’t use Wordpress have been spammed and one was blocked by Google! I let them know of this.

Finally today, they replied to me stating that my .htaccess file was corrupt. They provided me a link to download an anti-Malware program to see if there was Malware on my computer, hacking my data (I did find one infection). They deleted my .htaccess file too due to which most of my blogs pages could not be accessed as I use Permalinks (URL Rewrite) for my pages. So I decided that it was high time I did some serious work on my blog.

I updated my scripts, set extremely strict file permissions that don’t even allow me to read the contents of my server folders but after I rebuilt my sitemap. Now ‘SAWJ Blogs…’ is back at the top of Google results! (No Saad, it wasn’t blacklisted! One of my other domains was, but I rarely used it so I have deleted it’s contents.)

Let me know if you guys still face problems with my blog. (I know, I would’ve had less troubles with a blogging-service-hosted blog but hell, I wouldn’t have learned so much then!)

And for the record, I’ll be disabling the Threaded Comments plugin from the next post. It means that you would not be able to understand the order of the comments on the previous posts as they will be hap-hazard and you won’t be able to make out “who replied to who”. Do recommend a better plugin if you can or give me the address to the Follow Up Comments Notification plugin.

Have Fun!