A Little House Cleaning 1) Blogger plus Disqus plus Google+ 2) The Referrer Bots

CREATED/ LINKS/

We interrupt our usual Tuesday programming to bring you this public service announcement:
Google+ and Disqus don't play nice! 

I found this out the hard way. It wasn't until this morning, after a day of locked comments, that I found this on the
Google+ Comments FAQ page:
"What happens to my existing comments when I enable Google+ Comments?
If you use Blogger’s commenting platform, existing Blogger comments will stay on your blog, and you’ll continue to have the option to delete or mark them as spam. If you use a third-party commenting system, your comments might not be retained when you enable Google+ Comments." [my italics]

Gee, thanks for letting me know when I originally checked the box, G+. Yeah, I really want to lose all my comments for the last year.

I know you'd much rather see our 70's Pick-me-up girl, Vix,
vs reading my rants about things.
She'll bloom in full color on Thursday, I promise!

My other words of warning concern unusual spikes in your page views due to referrer shenanigans. Have you noticed that a random post has become wildly popular? It's flattering, yes, until you look at your stats and see that the views come from some strange sounding URL that you've never heard of. DON"T CLICK ON IT -- no matter how tempting! Sometimes these URLs will link to porn sites (eep!) or worse, contain malware which can infect who knows what in your blog or system.

My latest tormentor is r-e-f-e-r-e-r (dot) com. They have invaded ALL my blogs.
Here are some screenshots from my On the EDGE blog, where the spikes are very obvious:

note: this blog was started 1/7/13, Blogger starts the stats from the date I first started blogging

I did a Google search yesterday and from an Etsy discussion, found this link for an informative Zioli post. In a short video, Matt Cutts from Google explains what exactly is going on. The most important take-away from all this is: DON'T CLICK on anything suspicious!

+Arash Mazinani +Heather Fonseca and I will be discussing Google+ in a Google Hangout next Sunday at 10am PDT.
Are any of you Google+ mavens out there? Maybe you'd like to join us?