You may have noticed it recently. I would have missed it if not for a post I was trying to work on. We had a spammer among our reviewers (No names, please. We already know who it is.). It managed to poison my Westworld review with drug adverts, and caused two other posts to “disappear” with HTML tags. I managed to clean up the review, but didn’t realize the tag-poisoning until I saw the source from the “Corporations-Are-People” piece. I was able to clean that story up, but deleted the sexbot story without checking the source. Hopefully, I can find it in a cache somewhere, or someone managed to copy/backup the piece.

After all that, one more cleanup: The spammer’s account has been deleted.

Asleep at the wheel. Having a spammer infect our site is one thing, but not paying attention…

Unfortunately, like with last year’s spam-outbreak on the forums, I have to take some of the blame for not keeping a closer eye on CPR. Somewhere between a 40 hour work week with a 45 mile daily commute round trip, Neocron sessions, digging out from three feet of snow from two storms in a week, and looking for media and stories to review and blog, I lost track of this site and allowed the spammer(s) to do their dirty work.

Extra eyes needed. As you can see (!), running a website is a full-time occupation. Not easy when you already have a full-time occupation like consulting or document imaging, and your second doesn’t come with a paycheck. This is where we can use some help from our regular visitors and registered users. If you see what appears to be spam, shoot a private message to me. I will check it out and, if need be, delete it.

In the mean time, I’m going to make it a point to visit every day even if I don’t have anything to post. Nothing worse than seeing a good site being smothered in spam.

My deepest apologies, everyone. I’ve basically done nothing with the site these past two months. If not for Mr. Roboto, truly nothing would have been posted. Why, you ask? I wish I had a good reason, but the truth is I just sorta got overwhelmed with everything. Just briefly, in real life, I’m an independent consultant, which is sort of a boom-bust business. I now have full-time job in addition to two part-time jobs. On top of this I have a son who entered high school this year (I won’t bother you with the side issues associated with this). Bottom line, I feel really shitty leaving this site fallow. I wish I could come up with a better excuse, but truly, life just got in the way. As Neo was once told, I sort of decided (through behavior versus any real decision) that I just needed to unplug for a while. I’ve done no IMs, threaded discussions or the rest for the past good while (I basically immersed myself into paranormal fantasy books).

Making this worse, one of the site’s plugins, “Bad Behavior” blocked me and everyone else from making contributions, and me personally from making edits to the site (including cleaning out the trash comments). I finally got in and disabled this. Other issues include:

1. Lost comments: Sometimes you make a comment, but it doesn’t show up. Why? Usually the reason is due to an issue with an outdated template for the reviews I used for the first year of the site. When I switched out of it, I later found out I needed to go to every review posted on this site to get rid of a bunch of background code. Bottom line, the HTML is hosed in places. So your comment isn’t lost - it just isn’t showing up right now.

2. Spam spam spam spam spam: God, I hate this shit. I’m not going to go to a login model, ’cause that sucks. Perhaps a better option is for me to recruit a couple of you long-time contributors and give you admin rights so that you can help out with the policing when I’m not around. The Bad Behavior plugin doesn’t seem to be the answer, so I’ll be looking for others.

3. Change of ISP: While I don’t think there are any access issues, my latest ISP change has not worked out. I left a “cpanel” enabled site for a home-grown back-end. I ended up losing my ability to do refined stats and a bunch of other things. I will hopefully be finding a new site and moving it in my immense amount of spare time.

I spent yesterday soaking up Blade Runner “Final Cut” and all the associated extras (what a great great transfer, ey?). I think I’ve got my groove back, although the test will be whether or not you see a string of entries from me. I plan on doing this, but also have to do a bunch of background shit above - part of which got me down in the first place. I also have about a month’s worth of email to catch up on (if you think the spam is bad on this site, just try my CPR email account!).

So again, my deepest apologies to you all.

~SFAM~

I just noticed that CPR was down and bugged my ISP to get us back online. I recently switched ISPs. If there are issues with this ISP have less than a month now to cancel my agreement.

Please let me know if you are experiencing access problems to CPR. I want to know about downtime and really slow access. If you experience this, Comment here with the time the issue occurred (In GMT time or eastern standard time, preferably) and the symptoms. If I’m stuck with a dog, I need to know it earlier rather than later.

UPDATE: I am happy though that at least my ISP took responsibility for the downtime and apologized. The could have given me the run-around. This from my ISP:

I am very sorry for the downtime with this website. I reconfigured the Apache instance on the server and your site was back up and running right away. Please let me know if this happens again, or if you have any other questions.

Just a brief note on this, the Cyberpunk Wiki has undergone a change in plumbing. Previously we were using TikiWiki for our engine. I’ve just changed that out to the same engine that Wikipedia uses.

Why the change? Primarily for usability reasons. TikiWiki isn’t just a wiki, it’s a full-featured CMS. Unfortunately, as it tries to do everything, it does mosts things only halfway well. MediaWiki is more streamlined. It has less options, but does the Wiki thing a bit better. Also, people are more familiar with the wiki language used. Finally, we had a number of ugly hacks and bot attacks on the TikiWiki software. These may be fixable if I was smarter, but frankly I just got tired of it. I’m hoping that I can protect MediaWiki a bit better. It will also be easier to change the look and feel of the Wiki to look more like the rest of CPR.

Who Can Edit It? For the moment, anonymous edits are turned off. Hopefully, if I can get a few of you to help moderate the wiki, we can turn this feature back on and see how things go.

What about the Cyberpunk Images? TikiWiki had a gallery feature that some had used to upload images. It wasn’t great, but it worked. In a few weeks or so (after my upcoming vacation), I’ll install a gallery application. This will do the images better. Once we then transfer the images out of the TikiWiki app, I’ll turn it off. Until then, the old Wiki content is still available.

Finally, I TRULY want to thank everyone who spent time updating the Cyberpunk Wiki to date. We have some really good content there now. But we have lots more to go. If you have an interest in participating, just dig in! I think the plumbing change will make this easier.

~SFAM

As part of my recent deep dip into reality lately (meaning I haven’t been able to devote as much time making updates these past few weeks), I missed a nice little honorarium that CPR received. Ayato from the Meatspace forums noticed that Scifi.com listed CPR as Site of the Week on May 30th. Many special thanks to Ayato for finding this, and many more to Ken Newquist for selecting CPR (and many more thanks for the nice comments about the Matrix Essay - I still have a few more to upload)! Incidentally, even with the access issues and my lack of updates, CPR is still averaging 100,000 unique visitors a month now (around 170,000 total visits per month) accessing around 500,000 page views. Last year at this time CPR was averaging just over 5000 unique visitors a month making 50,000 page views, so I’d say growth has been pretty decent.

Now Ken, show us your clout - see if you can get us another season of the Dresden Files! (no, its not cyberpunk, but the Dresden Files, along with BSG are one of the best shows on TV).

My sincere apologies on the downtime. My ISP sucks. Apparently, this simple wordpress site taps out there entire server, so they took me offline. I’m in the process of transferring ISPs. Hopefully I can get this done in the next day or so. I hear Dreamhost actually is familiar with Wordpress-enabled sites, so I’ll be trying there.

~SFAM

Every now and then, the real world gets in the way of me spending a lot of time here. The last week or so certainly fits that description. While I’ve gotten the automated spam mostly under control, unfortunately, some jackasses took this time to post lots of spam type comments to various posts, including the Matrix essay. Many of the comments were using my name. Looks like I have yet another plug-in to install, which I will get to shortly. I’ve already added the IP addresses of the posters to my “banned” list, so hopefully this will die down. I’m also still figuring out how to stop automated spam to the Wiki. Hopefully this will be under control soon as well. In the mean time,

My apologies for the fake comments,

~SFAM~

OK, it’s that time again. I’ve been using a Wordpress theme from the previous release of Semiologic. Unfortunately, when I initially used this back last January, I didn’t know what I was doing, so I ended up kludging my own look into the existing theme. This has made it difficult to upgrade to get lots of cool new functionality. Additionally, with the latest version of Wordpress, I now have these ugly error messages at the bottom of the page.

After many days of toying around, I think I’m finally ready to upgrade. If perchance site looks totally hosed in a few short hours, chances are either I’m still in the process, or more likely, I’ve horribly destroyed CPR. If so, I’ll be begging my ISP to load up my saved versions. If successful, the site will be a tad wider, and look slightly different. Other than that, you shouldn’t notice significant differences.

Wish me luck!

Thanks to ETM’s wonderful suggestion to separate the words in the title (from cyberpunkreview to Cyberpunk Review), this site has climbed from page 3 on Google’s search results for the word “Cyberpunk” to the first page! Currently, Cyberpunk Review (CPR) is sitting at #9 or #10 in the North American Google search results for the word “Cyberpunk.” This changes around pretty frequently, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see CPR bounce back and forth between the top of page 2 and the bottom of page 1. Why does this matter? Because traffic increases dramatically as the site moves up in the rankings. This translates into more people commenting on the posts, more interaction in the forums, and hopefully more assistance on the Wiki!

Site Statistics Update
CPR has been on a pretty steady climb every since its inception in January, 2006. The addition of the forum definitely increased traffic, as did the more recent Wiki. The other contributor has been all those wonderful sites that now link to CPR. Technorati now shows 182 links from 91 blogs linking to CPR. Additionally, the decision not to stop others from using images directly from CPR has allowed many to find the site through various MySpace image linkages and Google Image searches. For instance, if you want to find images for Tetsuo (The Iron Man), CPR shows up on the first line. Here’s the overall statistics so far.

From 2006:

From 2007:

Notice the steady climb. February, which has 3 less days than January also lost a day due to a server change at my ISP, and still continued the climb.

Access by Country for the month of February, 2007:

The improved search results have changed the country composition. Previously, international access comprised about 40% overall. Now its closer to 30%. This is somewhat sad in that I love the international participation here at CPR. Lets get those search results up in Eastern Europe, ey?

Now as most of you know, I don’t do any advertising on Cyberpunk Review, which means it’s a massive time sink that doesn’t generate a dime (this is exactly how I want it to be!). Collecting advertising revenue on a site devoted to cyberpunk concepts just seems wrong somehow. That said, I have absolutely NO qualms about accepting gifts! Cyberpunk movies, books, figures (the Borg Queen, if you have it), games - I’d be more than happy to accept (send an email to sfam”at”cyberpunkreview.com if feel the urge!). While I have gotten a number of movies sent for me to review, this is my first cyberpunk book:

Successful erotic fantasy author, M. Christian, sent me a wonderful message saying how much he liked Cyberpunk Review, and offered to send me his book of “smutty cyberpunk short stories,” called The Bachelor Machine. I just got it in the mail today, so I can’t give a review of it yet. But often when I find a new author I’m interested in, I like to take the book and open it to a random page and start reading. Here’s a sample for you from the first place I opened it to - page 132, halfway down:

She walked with purpose down Ringold. Black plastic raincoat, cheap leather boots, a threadbare purple Zo/courier bag - showing what her last straight job was - and coal mine shades. Invisible in the SOMA turf, she was average enough not to catch a second glance.

But I knew her - we’d fucked. But never in the flesh. Cybersea fucking: interactive chat and visuals. Breasts just the right size for filling hands, she said. An electric cunt tight enough to rip condoms off, she said. We’d fucked so many times, but I’d never seen her in the flesh, and I’d never asked her real name.

Trust.

Bytebitch saw me. Didn’t smile. The brown eyes behind the shades might have, but I had no way of knowing. On the corner with me was the picked-clean corpse of a Saab. She moved to the pitted fender and propped herself against it.

Cybersez: Get Comfy…

I think I’m gonna like The Bachelor Machine! Thanks, Chris! Better yet, M. Christian mentions he has another cyberpunk erotica book due to come out in a year from now. I’ll be looking forward to it. And if you want to learn more about him, M. Christian has this cool blog.