Blog changes coming this year, none good: one temporary, one experimental

but not all changes are permanent

For the past two weeks the blog’s been under attack by comely Russian maidens promising wild sex beyond my dreams. I suspect these are not legitimate.

They’re coming in at the rate of almost 5 an hour, and I’ve grown tired of swatting them away. I can’t block them — they employ a dynamic IP system, so the address changes with each one, and Disqus would charge me $105 a month to segregate all comments containing links, instead of the current $11.50 I’m paying, and that’s a hefty sum. So, temporarily, I hope, I’m activating the “moderate before posting” option. That will hurt the spontaneity of the current comment feature, which I regret very much, but I’m hopeful that, as these attacks seem to come in waves, this one too, like Omicron, will spike, and fade away soon, in which case I’ll go back to the registered commenter system (how these guys get past that gateway now I don’t know, but if they can hack NSA’s firewall, I’m sure Disqus’s is a piece of cake.

ADVERTISING

And I’m going to try selling a bit of advertising. It costs almost $5,000 a year to keep up my membership in the Greenwich Association of Realtors and access to its MLS, which I need if I’m to continue reporting on local related estate, which was the original purpose of this blog, and one readers obviously are still interested in (and probably the feature that brings them in and keeps them here, rather than my political rants, which I’m sure they just ignore). I’ve been absorbing that cost for almost 20 years because the commissions earned from 5-or-6 readers who turn into either sellers or buyers more than made up for it. But that number has dwindled to perhaps 2-or 3, and the MLS fees have become more significant.

So I’m going to try advertising, but as unobtrusively as possible. If grotesque pictures of gum disease or bowel purges crop up, I’ll ditch the idea.

In the meantime, if any of you builders or other real estate - related businesses out there want a local platform for 5,000 Greenwich readers, spare your fellow readers from obnoxious ads for tooth decay prevention, and contact me — there’s room.

So we’ll try this, and see how it goes.

(Link is deactivated; let me know if you’d like the active link to contact Ana and spice up your sex life. Who knows? You might get lucky.)