The internet in awash with stories of hacking, from big-time corporate websites, government dotcoms or relatively smaller ones like blogs. I have read my own share of sad stories of personal pages getting hacked, with all their data destroyed beyond recovery. However, they didn’t really affect me. Sure, I felt sorry for these poor souls but they had no direct link to me or my site for me to be truly affected. Until now.

I have visited Chalk is Cheap more than a few times before through Entrecard, dropping cards on a regular basis and reading some of his posts as well. It was during one of these visits that I chanced upon its owner’s invitation to join a new Entrecard dropping scheme he was setting up, ReciproDrops. I quickly signed on despite not knowing exactly what it was. It sounded good, with the words recipro and drops seemingly promising assured daily visits from its members. That was more than a month ago. Since then, our blogs have enjoyed regular traffic from members and the group was steadily growing, thanks in part to
Arnold’s diligence is “policing” us through regular email reminders and tracking reciprocal visits. However, I was surprised to find the following on his site when I was about to start my drops today:

I have just been informed by the host of this site that my database has been broken into in some or other way. Most of the articles have been destroyed. I have received 215 039 spam comments just today. I received a further 600 odd hate mails via e-mail. My machine has been infected by a variety of viruses and worms.

I used to run a news blog in South Africa which was effectively closed down in much a similar way by certain right-wing elements in my home country. I am afraid they have found my new site and the nightmare is about to start all over again.

I do have backups and I could very easily start up again but in all honesty, this old man is now too old, the b******s have won.

I am closing Chalk is Cheap down with immediate effect and have already changed my e-mail address. I will continue developing static and blog themes offline. These I will make available as open source templates and themes via a friends site.

I have enjoyed the ride, it was fun. I have met many interesting people and found even more wonderful sites. I thank you all.

I know nothing about hacking, or how I can protect my site from it. In fact, before today it still wasn’t real to me. But the loss of Arnold’s site changed all that.

Sad that this had to happen now, just as we were reaping the fruits of his recipro system. I will, however, continue dropping on fellow members’ sites just as before. It’s a good thing I have copied and saved their links from Arnold’s site. This was a good working scheme and I hope someone will continue what Arnold has started.

Update: I just received some good news. Lisa Martin of lisareviews.com is willing to host ReciproDrops on her site and thus, continue the scheme that Arnold has started. Thanks Lisa.

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