It is now week 7 of SSK12, I’ve submitted my first assignment and I am struggling to get back into a solid study routine following the aftermath of a narrowly avoided disaster at work.
Author: Melissa
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Crappy Birthday to Me!
Well it was my birthday more than two weeks ago but I had to give my family birthday lunch a miss because something major came up at work.
Our bloody supplier had been playing silly buggers for a couple of days, and ended up going into liquidation. So we had to switch all the customers over to another carrier. Why oh why didn’t we listen to the little warning signs (because we were tied into a bloody tight contract, that’s why!)
Just a bloody nightmare for the entire two weeks. Settings had to change, ADSL broadband had to be churned and every customer wanted to talk to us at the same time. We were getting something like 400 calls a day at one point.
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A serious disruption
Well, the crap hit the fan at work a few days ago. Our wholesale carrier network had a major outage, no-one could tell us exactly what was going on and customers were offline for over 48 hours. The rumours have been flying thick and fast, particularly on the Whirlpool broadband discussion site. More recently there has been a news follow-up by the Sydney Morning Herald.
At this point, some of the services are back online; there has still been no communication from the carrier. We have over 800 calls on our messagebank, a vague plan underway to shift customers onto another network, and very fortunate to have a recent backup of all our customer records.
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More time would be great..
I feel I’ve wasted so much time in this unit, the first couple of weeks I was trying to get my head around what I was doing. I’d love to have that time back!
Now in week 4 and I have just skimmed through the last of week 2/3.. I have completed five of the required eight assessment log entries and have yet to start my essay, due next Friday.
Feeling a little bit of pressure – I would have liked to have started my essay by now. I have five full study days left, then a few shorter sessions here and there around work.
It is all going so fast I am not sure I am absorbing everything I’m learning, it is hard to put some of the time management exercises into practise when I don’t seem to have enough time!
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Stopping Fake Forum Registrations
Fake forum registrations – why would anyone do it? Most fake registrations include a website link in their profile, which is then published in the forum memberlist when their registration is submitted. Spammers take advantage of this to help improve their search engine ranking (Google is an important search engine which uses ‘relevancy’ to rank a listing. This includes checking for links from other sites) and drive traffic to their website.
There are two main types of spammers – bots and humans. Bot spammers are usually the easier of the two to deal with. Visual confirmation is one of the most effective weapons. a randomly generated set of numbers/letters that have to be confirmed by a person manually typing the information into the registration form. Changing some of the common file names and variables can also be effective against bots.
Much harder to foil are human spammers. These are people who seemingly spend all day visiting forum sites, filling out registration forms to get their website link ‘out there’.
One forum site I manage is run on the popular phpBB forum software, and gets several fake registrations a day. After implementing the visual confirmation option, enforcing Admin activation only and making some other small anti-bot changes I’ve realised the only way to slow down these spammers is to make it impossible for them to include their website link in their profile when they register.
I utilised this MOD to remove the website and signature fields from the registration form. I’m keeping my fingers crossed with this that it will cut down the rubbish.
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Study Chick
A full day of study on Wednesday, lots of reading and thinking about where this study unit is taking me. I was surprised at how well I was absorbing the information, it is exciting to be learning something for the hell of it and feel my brain shifting into gear!
Then yesterday I worked. It was a full day of answering phone calls, solving email and connection problems, answering questions about phone and internet services. I did some more study after tea, until I could study no more. Then I checked out the student forums. It is heartening to know there are other students feeling the same as me – a little overwhelmed, worried about falling behind, yet excited at the prospect of learning.
This morning I feel a little drained. It is clear I will need to pace myself better to keep up my energy levels. It has been a long time since I’ve worked so hard. I am very fortunate that I only work part-time and have two or three days a week (plus weekends) to give to study. Some of the other students are working full-time, raising families. How do they do it?!
I am still completing last week’s exercises but I am not panicking yet. I should be able to get through a lot this weekend. I think the first week is a write off anyway, it is all about wrapping your brain around the study materials.
The first assessment task is due in three weeks, it is a 1,000 word essay. I copied and pasted some text into my word processor to see what 1,000 words looks like – it is quite short: approximately two pages!
Another day of work today. If I feel up to it this evening I will finish off the exercise I started last night. Otherwise the weekend starts tomorrow.