Tag: Web Development

photo credit: selvaI’ve always had the worst kind of luck when it comes to spam. While many of my blogger pals get away without even implementing anti-spam techniques like CAPTCHA, I suffer from a daily truckload of spam. For example, in the short period since I shifted to WordPress in April till today, the spam filter on my blog has blocked around 110+ spam comments. People like Prashanth on the other hand, have only got 110+ or so spam comments in TWO YEARS. So I’m getting ten times more spam in two MONTHS than him. And that’s just one example. Everyone else I know who blogs – Naman, Vivek, Anuj, Abhishek – pretty much everyone seems to be immune huge amounts of spam. Why me? :p And to top it off, WordPress’ spam filtering system ALWAYS flags my comments on others blog as spam. Go figure.

Long before I’d shifted to my own hosting – or even had my own domain name, I needed a file storage service to distribute any files I had. And at that time, I’d chosen Streamload, which had later shifted its customers to its parallel service called MediaMax. Now, out of nowhere, they’ve decided to pull the plug on their users, and shift it to a paid service. It’s simple – pay ~$6 per month, or say goodbye to your files. THIS is pure extortion, and cheating customers in its ugliest form. I doesn’t hurt me, simply because all my files are now safely on my own hosting. But what about users who’re not so lucky, and had trusted a company with their online backups?

This is SICK. When people shut shop, they let their users make a move. When Yahoo! Photos closed down, they gave the choice to their users to move to other services, like Yahoo!’s own Flickr – and even their competitors like Snapfish and Photobucket. The very least MediaMax could have done was to offer to shift to Box.net or something. They didn’t. And I really think their reputation will suffer because of this, as new users will be apprehensive about trusting a site which does NOT think about its customers before making a move.