Followers of this site know that the hugely popular “Hossey Music Award Song Voting Contest” was never completed in 2006 and 2007 because spammers shut down our voting system. They also know that in May of 2008 (after nearly a year of hiatus) I launched a redesign of this site complete with several anti-spam features.

Well, the new security system has done its job fairly well, blocking more than 3,000 junk comments that spam bots have tried to post in the last four months.

But the system isn’t fool proof.

Since July, I have received at least 10,000 robot-submitted requests to be “Members” of HossTheBoss.com. No matter how I tweaked the system, the spammers figured out how to keep sending the requests. I don’t know what they hoped to gain from bombarding me with an average of 20 junk emails a minute, but they did it nevertheless.

So this means that the “members” program that I’d planned to begin about now is on hold while I figure out how to keep legitimate members from having to content with spammers. Once I’d had 100 people signed up for the program, I had intended to begin making special offers, sending out exclusive music news via email, and providing a number of other benefits. Initially, I’d planned to offer the memberships for free, but, once the program took off, I intended to ask for a $25/year fee in order to support the site.

All of that is just going to have to wait, dang it. Sorry.

Thanks are definitely due to the few dozen legitimate HossTheBoss.com fans who signed up for the initial memberships. (Because of the spammers, I am certain that I missed acknowledging some “real” requests for membership. Please accept my apology if you sent one of those.) I’m sorry that it just didn’t work out — at least not yet.

You may have already noticed that I’ve replaced that “Membership Sign-Up Page” of this site with a donation page. I hope you might be willing to donate so we can keep this site going and growing. If we get enough support from donations, we might be able to afford an even fancier security system and, then, I’ll start the membership program again quickly. Everyone who donates now will definitely be invited to join that — for free — when it starts.

Just another day in the life of an independent radio station being run entirely on a shoestring by volunteers. The best I can do in these situations is just be honest, dang it. Thanks for your patience. We really are  going to start kicking some butt on this station eventually.