We’ve been offering free forum and blog hosting for the past year and a half on numerous sites. In each case and for each hosting site we believed, and still do, that it was a worthwhile cause to offer this free service. While financially our business-model is a failure (we earn less than 5% each month from the advertising posted on our sites compared to the costs incurred for our server hosting, management, and programmer, not mentioning the numerous hours spent by us to manage, design, assist members, and add to the sites) we look forward to a day when online publishing platforms such as the WPMU blog system here at MountainBlogs.info, are everyman’s cost-free online publishing and collaboration platforms for family and friends, as well as for work and play.

As a public school teacher I have seen first hand the positive empowerment and engagement resulting from students’ academic use of online tools, and as an online school teacher and administrator I can mention some of the studies that show that close to 50% of U.S. public school students will attend some form of online courses by 2019. Whether we use online publishing platforms to communicate,to learn, to teach, to share advice, to shop, sell, or purchase goods, to advertise our businesses or services, or to stay in touch with family members, friends, acquaintances, or colleagues, this trend is here to stay.

Sadly, there are numerous “dubious characters” on the internet who try to disrupt sites, or make a quick buck without regard of their actions. Such individuals may promise companies instant fame on the internet by bombarding free blog and forum hosting such as ours with “keyword-rich” advertising of various business without regard of the context of the online community they’re spamming. Wikipedia has some helpful information about spam and splogs as well (click on the links to access this).

In our case, we’ve received more than 25 spam blogs on this site alone in the last 24 hours. We manually deleted the splogs and identified the members who have created them as “spammers” and took additional actions to deny them future access.

We currently have and use several powerful plugins which work as tools to combat comment spams and will discuss them further in our “Featured Plugins” posts category.

To learn more about the pervasive issue of splogs and comment spam and how blog owners are dealing with this here’s an online conversation that may shed further light into the problem: http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic/12496

Rest assured that we will remain diligent in combating spam and splogs. Should you come across something that resembles a spam or splog on our site, please let us know so that we can “take a look.”
We welcome your questions on this topic as well as constructive comments bellow.

Thank you,
Elvis aka MaestroSersea, MountainBlogs.info Founder and Webmaster