I have two websites that I’ve learned to maintain over the years. I also have an experienced web designer I’ve used for the last 20 years to do the more complex back-end design and HTML stuff.

What’s really getting my goat (lots of disputed meanings for that phrase) is the sheer volume and global reach of people with bad intentions. I hate how they waste my time.

First there were the African princes and dying widows who had storerooms of money for me. Then the IRS and FBI jumped into the game. Snail mail, faxes, emails then text messages. The giveaways were the bad grammar and over-the-top endearments. Vacation contest winners – I toyed with a few asking them where I could come to pick up my prizes. They invariably hung up. Duct cleaning, window virus removal, sites of beef, driveway sealers.

Next came the veterans of [insert location of conflict] seeking ‘good Christian women’ they knew would be ‘faithful companions’. Listen, dude, the only proposal I want to hear is from someone rushing over to clean my house, finish the ironing, tidy the garage and weed the flowers beds.

It only took a few days for Coronavirus scammers to jump on the bandwagon – social media posts, emails, phone calls, media articles about unapproved and misbranded products, claiming they can treat or prevent the Coronavirus. The companies’ products include teas, essential oils, and colloidal silver. It’s shameful, and they’ll suck in thousands of the unwary and uninformed.

When I was a kid, we had door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesmen and guys in cheap suits hawking aluminum siding and insurance policies. We had the Irish Sweepstakes – back then, gambling was illegal, so those who bought tickets literally did that under the counter. Or else you had to know ‘a guy’. Did anyone ever win? And even if they did, were they able to collect?

For me, it’s the weekly roundup of messages from my website host informing me of that, “A lockdown event has occurred due to too many failed login attempts or invalid username.” Not just one or two attempts to break into my websites but multiple tries each day. Blunt force attacks, Denial of Service attacks – you name it, they try it.

Last summer, I kept getting warnings that my bandwidth usage was spiking and hogging up the shared servers. When I looked at the stats, I discovered that thousands of pages were being accessed with mind-boggling frequency. If they’d been genuine visitors, I would have been incredibly popular. But alas, they had nefarious leanings.

Look. I post articles about what I’m doing or reading or where I’m travelling – nothing momentous. I’d certainly enjoy being a social media star (especially if that would catapult my novel onto a bestseller list) , but I’m just a tiny glimmer in the firmament of millions of other blogs.

When I checked out the origins of those site visitors (and it’s so easy to do once you log on to your dashboard) I felt like my website URL had been, as the expression goes, “on more laps than a table napkin”. Passed around the world – Kazakstan, Poland, Germany, Argentina, Italy, Pakistan, Spain, the U.S. and some places I’ve never heard of. If I could slap back, I’d bury them under an avalanche of cat videos and stupid memes.

It’s nuisance having to block all these IP address, but it’s better than some shady product reseller or porn purveyer hopscotching from my little websites to reap profits from the unwary.