Yesterday morning, I woke up to more than 500 emails. Not from friends. Not from clients. Not from Nigerian princes offering investment opportunities.
These were comment notifications from a website I built for a client more than a decade ago.
This client decided to go with a cheaper developer in 2019.
This website belongs to a law firm. Not a hobby blog. Not a recipe site. A law firm. I noticed that one post alone, published back in February, had accumulated 15,982 comments. Almost sixteen thousand. 15,982 comments advertising casinos, crypto schemes, miracle cures, and porn.
For an unknown reason — either because the site hasn’t been updated with the latest bug fixes or a setting was modified — all of a sudden, I was being notified of every new spam comment left on their website.
It’s like selling a house, moving away, and then receiving notifications every time the new owner’s smoke detector battery gets low!
Getting multiple new email messages per minute, I called the law firm…
And they sent me to voicemail! To get the emails to stop, I did a little investigating and discovered something else the new developer had forgotten to do: remove my user account.
That’s right. Seven years after another developer took over, I could still log in. Once inside, I found my email address attached to the administrator account. Since I was rapidly becoming the world’s leading authority on spam comments left on a law firm’s website, I decided a change was necessary.
I replaced my email address with one belonging to someone in the firm.
Suddenly, I wasn’t the only person interested in solving the problem. 😈
I have no idea if has been fixed yet. I haven’t checked. At this point, my involvement in the matter has officially ended. All I know is that my inbox is quiet again.
The best troubleshooting technique is simply making sure the problem reaches the people who actually own it.
I’m retired and have other stuff to do…
Now you know: A convicted murderer locked in a Victorian asylum for the criminally insane secretly wrote over 10,000 definitions for the Oxford English Dictionary. The editors had no idea he was institutionalized until they visited him in person. His name was William Chester Minor.