2019 … a year of surprises

Greetings! I hope your 2019 is drawing to a satisfactory close, with friends and family near.

I have been offline for about a month. I had a medical interruption in the normal flow of life, but also have been wrestling with the reality of the cyber world today. The short story is that I have had to wipe out much of my site membership. If you feel asif you’ve been excluded, please drop me a note at: jbr@johnbairdrogers.com

If anyone doubts that there is a massive effort to co-opt the cyber world we who blog and communicate via the internet live in, my story may remove some of those doubts.

I use WordPress for my blog. It is ancient by cyber world standards, having first been released in 2003. The standard install assumes that a website owner like me wants as many subscribers as possible.

About a year ago, I began to get a trickle of new users I didn’t recognize. This became a freshet, then a cascade. When I tried to track back these new users, I ran into dead ends. As of yesterday, I had just shy of 4.000 bots as members.  I have had to delete them all and make new users (subscribers) ask to join.

I will restart regular posts shortly.

Author: John Rogers

I have thought of myself as a writer for most of my adult life. In 2011, I became a fiction writer full time. I studied creative writing as an English major in college. Then came family and career. I worked in finance and biotech and did a wonderful stint in Vienna. Now, I have the opportunity to use those experiences as the substrate for my stories. My first novel takes on the world of Big Data and the very timely issue of cyber war. The second uses the manipulation of financial derivatives as impetus for attempted murder during a trip from Vienna to Budapest on the Danube. I have taken writing instruction at the Cape Cod Writers Conference and from The Loft in Minneapolis. I am finding writers’ groups to be very helpful as concept editors, as well as practical advice from the published authors. I am in three such groups. I have taken writing instruction at the Cape Cod Writers Conference and from The Loft in Minneapolis. View all posts by John Rogers