Spam Bug Removal Task

By Honey B Wackx

Some internet marketing daily tasks

I spent the past 2 hours or longer trying to determine the source of some probable website spam on one of my websites. Actually I think three of them might have the same spam creature on it. I don’t know if there is any harm being done to the sites, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.

The spam is a small smiley face character at the very bottom of the website. It’s been there for about three months or so and this is the first time I’ve tried to locate the source of it. It seems it is an ASCII character that somehow is appearing in the footer part of all web pages on the site.

I looked in the code, but could find nothing suspicious. I am a programmer, but my website is mostly php language and I don’t know much about php. Although I cannot program in that language some statements in it I can understand. Unfortunately a single web page is made up of a lot of php and some html all mixed in together. Code from a lot of places is all added together to make the web page and it is not so easy to trace the source of everything without spending an excessive amount of time.

I had the same smiley character appear on one of my other sites a while back and I was able to get rid of it. I squashed that spam bug by deactivating and then reactivating one of the plugins. At least that’s what it seemed like because the smiley face disappeared and never returned.

That’s no proof it’s really gone, but that will have to do until I know better. I forgot exactly which plugin it was but have an idea. Unfortunately the one I think it was for that other website is not the cause of the problem on this particular website I’m working on right now.

So far I’ve only been able to deactivate and reactivate only about ten of about 40 plugins on the site. So far no luck in getting rid of that smiley. At the rate it’s going it will take me another couple of hours or longer to disable and restart the rest of the plugins. Even that is no assurance that I can find the source of the bug. I just hope it’s not doing any destruction to my site.

Such is a common concern if one has a website. If you are like me with lots of sites then it could be a MAJOR problem. It sometimes seems like everyone else wants to control your site but you.

It’s time to eat so I’ll lay off this annoying task for a while. Maybe later today or tomorrow I will continue. Alternately I just might check the internet to see how others have solved the problem. Certainly if I have this problem others have it too. That’s one good thing about the internet. It’s often easy to solve problems since so many of them are common problems and others write about them and often you’ll find a solution.

Charles