Yes, the site was not working right for a few hours this morning. Seems someone found a sneaky way to redirect traffic from my site to a crappy MP3 site.
Now, I’m not doing crazy numbers here; OneOfSwords is not even a year old and it’s growing basically by word of mouth. I’m not really sure why someone would want to take my fairly modest traffic and apply it to their site. it could have been intentionally malicious — someone who didn’t agree with my Kotick quote research piece, maybe — or it could be someone who was actually hired to do it by the redirected target site, to boost traffic.
If that’s the case, I would think that the simple fact that you need to hijack sites to send traffic to your crappy MP3 site would mean a) you’ve proven you do indeed run a site so crappy that you need to pay hacker kiddies to bring you scraps of traffic and b) you are going to alienate anybody who was trying to get to the site you hijacked in the first place. I mean, is anybody going to say “Hey, I wonder what stupid nonsense Dan’s up to this morning and…oh look, Best of Oumguil is now available!” and start clicking? Say what you will about Activision’s business practices, but it’s never been that stupid.
So, in other words, I am here to officially squash the rumors: Oumguil is not appearing in Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock.
BTW, much love to my hosts, InMotion Hosting, for their usual awesome help. I’ve been working with them for over a decade on all my personal and professional sites and I cannot say enough nice things about them. They’re on Twitter if you have any questions.
Keep calm and carry on.
