Friends, We Need Your Help To Get Out Of The Revolving Door In Hell

Oh.My.God. What a relief it is just to be able to get a screen up on a functioning site and start to draft something. The site went offline Thursday between 2:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. Since then it has been a kaleidoscope of horrors, three crashes in three days. The spammers finally did us in. We were hacked.

I haven’t slept much in the past three days.

I was up late Thursday night dealing with a technician halfway around the world and this is a day after I brought in another technician to do permanent oversight. Our hosting provider had disabled us due to the severity of the hacking as a safety precaution to the other sites we share the server with. So the first hurdle was to remove malware. I had a techie in Manilla at the hosting company and a techie in India doing the actual work and I was playing go between monitoring the process on the phone with one and email with the other. This is around 2:00 a.m. Then the guy in India started working on removing the 500 errors.

So the next morning, I dutifully called a company that specializes in malware protection and anti-hacking, and bought a package. The guy there neglected to tell me that he would have to take the site offline in order to install the package. And I have no way of knowing whether a function can run in the background or necessitates shutting down, unless somebody tells me. So, down we went again on Friday.

Then I find out on Saturday that there was a miscommunication between the hosting provider and the malware company and something crucial got left undone. Too many cooks spoil the broth, all that. That brought about Crash III.

Now by this time I’m utterly hysterical, it goes without saying, and I keep calling back every few hours to see when repairs will be done. At one point Saturday I got a techie on the phone who let it slip that no work was being done. I demanded a supervisor and he told me that it could be two or three days  to even begin work and I said, “You’ve failed to fix this problem and it’s been going on for days now. You sold me 24 hour service and I am demanding what you sold me. If you drive me out of business you won’t have me as a client. I am hemorrhaging money right now.”

If this is new information to you, in dealing with these companies they will stonewall you and tell you they can’t do anything and you have to keep demanding that somebody address the issue. It is true what they say about squeaky wheels and grease.

So by late Saturday I was literally asking dear readers who were emailing me to light candles and chant to the cyber gods, because I was at wit’s end.

What I need to do now is pass the hat. I don’t like to do it, but the last time was a year ago, so it’s not like we do it everyday. I don’t like begging people for money and I refuse to adopt the shameless tactics of the DCCC, with their “the sky is falling and my hair is on fire, we’re all dead if you don’t send $9 now” emails.

The fact is, we’ve been caught in a double bind all year. This site separated from its sister site, Daily Sound and Fury, in January. That’s when the technical problems began. Additionally, we had major financial problems, because when we opened up our own PZ account with Google AdSense, we kept getting put on suspension for reasons which Google will not disclose. Google is a powerful behemoth, it can crush you like a gnat but it won’t tell you why. Believe me, if you go into a community chat at Google, it’s like a religion as people speculate that this or that might have brought down the wrath of the Google gods upon some poor unsuspecting website owner’s head.

Bottom line, we lost thousands of dollars in revenue because the ads kept going in and out of restricted status. I finally freaked out in March and got with another ad providing company and we will get our first paycheck from them mid-July. Murf and I have been working for free, Mopsy — Michelle — has been working for deferred pay. Those two are a pair of troopers. If I have to be at war, at least I’m in the foxhole with the right people.

And our good buddy Denis Eliot has not drawn any pay either, and he’s the front line defense against the spam bots. But for Denis, who’s a former Marine if this is news to you, the hackers would have gotten us long ago.

That’s the cast of our little drama, two disabled Irishmen, an Australian and a Marine (also disabled), all doing our best to keep The Little Political Blog That Could chugging down the tracks.

And the most important component of this paradigm is you, our readers. If it is at all possible for you to spare a few dollars, just to help pay the recent expenses that have been incurred for us to fight off the hackers and stay on the internet, it would be most appreciated.

Send donations to my PayPal, [email protected]

Anything you can spare will be wonderful. It’s the old adage, you have to spend money to make money. We have had to upgrade our defenses, pay for immediate trouble shooting and secure reliable technical support. All the money is going out and we’ve been offline so much that we haven’t been making any money. But despite this, all our fixed costs remain in place and we have to keep paying them to stay in business.

I have every confidence that the site will become bigger. We started out as a basic grassroots project, with pieces getting as little as 30 views back in the day and we’ve grown to see pieces get tens of thousands, and on occasion, hundreds of thousands of views.

Also, our voice has been amplified on Twitter by Rick Wilson, MeidasTouch, and Garry Kasparov. And you may recall our fifteen minutes of fame, when Mike Lindell went bonkers about myself and the site on his Frank-a-Thon and then Jimmy Kimmel put up a supercut of Lindell’s melt down the next night on his monologue. I was on cloud nine that week. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that my name and PolitiZoom would be coming out of Jimmy Kimmel’s mouth.

We’re definitely on the right track and going the right direction. We just need a little help from our friends to get by.

And if you have particular issues with not getting email notifications, or seeing pop ups, or anything at all, now is the time to speak up and I’ll get those matters looked into.

Thank you, my friends. You are the wind beneath our wings, truly.

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