Snail Spam

When I started blogging, I called my blog “Snail in a Turtleneck,” a cute image that Andrew & I came up with. I drew up my mascot:

and I began posting cartoons I had drawn. I quickly became bored of doing cartoons, and found I was more motivated to put up technical blog posts. Most of my initial readers were coworkers and MongoDB users. When Andrew and I got married, I told my teammates the day before that I’d be out the next day, as I was getting married (we got married at the city clerk’s, so it wasn’t a big production). When I got back to work, I found this at my desk:

I was very touched by their thoughtfulness: Andrew and I still have the stuffed snail and I brought the tape dispenser along to Google (where, unfortunately, it was later lost during an intra-office move).

However, as MongoDB gained popularity, some of my posts became very popular and I began to regret the name: customers seemed a little embarrassed to mention they had gotten advice from it and a lot of people didn’t realize that I was actually behind it. I purchased kchodorow.com, set up permanent redirects, and basically stopped referencing “Snail in a Turtleneck.” After a couple of years, I let the domain name lapse.

Last week, someone told me that my site had been hacked. I was confused, until they told me it was snailinaturtleneck.com. I took a look and, bizarrely, someone seems to have taken a dump of my site circa 2011, put spam on the index, and put it up at snailinaturtleneck.com, complete with my artwork, cartoons, etc. The domain was registered through a privacy protection service, so I guess the next step is sending a DCMA takedown notice to the registrar.

Who does this? (I mean, spammers, but… so annoying.)