The internet, says my husband, is not as nice a place as we’d like to think. It is more like a dark alley, and every second of every day, there are hands reaching out to rattle the doorknobs, checking, checking, checking all down the alley for any unguarded portal.
I hate that image, it gives me the heebie-jeebies; so I thought I’d share it with you.
Apparently in the past month, my blog has come under attack by an unprecedented number of spam subscriptions. In an effort to address that issue, we tightened some security settings and inadvertently shut down the comment section. Also our email sending service, as I informed you, went on the blink for undisclosed reasons of its own, and failed to notify my readers of the giveaway.
All that to say, it was the quietest giveaway I’ve ever started. The funny side of the story is that in my original post, I’d written “Today, September Farm is offering you a chance to win one of their Small Samplers free of charge. (Seriously, did I just see you jump out of your seat? I know there’s exciting stuff here, but my gracious. Calm down.) Each Small Sampler includes…”
I hit publish, and the next morning I awoke to no comments. Zero. Not one, and I thought, “Good grief, people, I didn’t mean that calm…”
Even after we figured out the email notification issue and I breathed easier and sent another email to let you know about the giveaway, it took us another hour or two to figure out that comments had been disabled. We fixed that (we thought) and are still hearing reports that commenting is not working properly. So our problems are not behind us.
How is it that I can lump along writing about nothing for weeks and things go fine, and as soon as I collaborate with someone else and care about it more, everything blows up as predicted by Mr. Murphy? Believe it or not, we are not doing this to exasperate you. But I’m so sorry if we’re succeeding.
I need you to do me a favor.
If you want to enter the September Farm giveaway and are having trouble leaving a comment on my blog, please email your comment to [email protected] and I’ll take care of copying and pasting it to the right place.
If you’re not sure if your comment already posted, double check by searching the page. (Control + F enables you to “Find” text, including your name.)
If you are having trouble accessing parts of the blog, subscribing to my posts, leaving a comment, or otherwise living a happy life online, and you would like to help us solve the problem, please email my tech-support husband at [email protected]. Your feedback helps us address the issues!
Most of all, thank you for hanging in there with us and our technology. Blogs are human too…
Or something.
As of Nov 14, the September Farm giveaway is closed.
I have not heard of September Farms before but I would love to taste that cheese!
Gotta see if I can leave a comment–and win some great cheese. 🙂
Would love to taste their cheese… And a free sample, so much better!
Thanks for the recommendation. Will need to check out the store the next time I’m in Lancaster!
I just found that all your blog updates had gone to my spam. So glad to catch up here now!
Renata 🙂
I’m sorry. 🙁 There should be a way to “approve sender” so it doesn’t keep happening, usually by moving one email to your inbox or by right clicking on it for a drop-down list of options. Hope that helps!
In Gmail, you can right-click on an email in the Spam folder and select “Not spam.” Gmail will learn pretty quickly which emails you want to read.
Eeeep! Every week I come back to find your pizza crust recipe and this week the search bar isn’t working. I think I can make it from memory, just commenting so you can fix the bar.
That post is at https://sharizook.com/our-favorite-pizza/. I’ll follow up with the search problem directly.
Oh cheese! It looks quite yummy…
Do they ship across the border? This Canadian family loves cheese!
They don’t ship into Canada currently. Sorry!
One thing I know: September Farm cheese is delicious! Would love a sampler of it! (Commenting here because the giveaway page isn’t working for my comment.)
Goodness. I’m sorry for the hassle, but it is okay – We will be using entries from both blog posts. Thanks for joining!
Some of your posts are coming to my email and some aren’t. I checked my spam folder and the missing emails aren’t in there. It’s not a huge deal for me since I tend to just check occasionally and read up on whatever I’ve missed, but I thought you might want to know.
Thanks for letting us know, Rosina. Occasionally our email sending service (SparkPost) will run afoul of the anti-spam cops and Shari’s emails get trapped in Internet gridlock. Usually it gets straightened out, and there’s not a lot we can do to ensure 100% delivery rates. We keep trying.