Posted on May 8, 2007

• I need to clear the air about something. Back in March I was alerted to the fact that a website called “Siteadvisor”, run by McAfee, had “redlisted” my site. Specifically they claimed to have received spam emails after “signing up”. What really happened is that their robot entered an email address in my guestbook. At the time I allowed people to enter their email address along with their guestbook post (it wasn’t mandatory). The email address was then displayed next to the post.

  Shortly thereafter their email address was harvested by a program which surfs the web and collects email addresses from web pages. The spam they received was not sent by me.

  When I found out about this I immediately contacted the Siteadvisor people. I removed the email field from the guestbook and asked them to recheck my site. They came back to me shortly thereafter saying that my site would be given the “green” rating, but that the change would take 4 weeks to propagate through the database.

  I don’t know what sort of slow database they are running, but the change still hasn’t been made. Repeated emails from me requesting the change be made have been ignored. Now folks using this plugin are afraid to visit my site.

  At this point I’m not sure what else to do. I am still working to get the rating changed, but I wanted you all to know what was going on. DB has never, and will never send spams. I have prided myself on treating my site visitors, both members and non-members, as I would like to be treated and will continue to do so.