Basically we had an incursion by a spammer bot, which is a virtual creature interested primarily in installing a huge number of links on sites. The ‘bot prowls the web looking for sites, in this case WordPress sites—sort of like the oldtime burglar [in the era before electronic locks] who has once checked into a hotel room, pretends to have lost his key, and then once the hotel installs a new guest in that room—uses his key to burgle the room. Or in this case, it came in via a chink in the template and used our ‘phone’ to try to con the search engines that another site it’s related to got a bunch of hits, [as best I understand it] thus boosting the search engine rating of the other site and trashing our rating. This ‘burglar’ deposited his stuff here [the list of links], but didn’t ‘take’ anything. It’s a WordPress burglar, which knows certain accesses, and once those are nailed shut (we think we have done that) will not be bothering us again. A Word Press site operates via certain ‘templates’—think of them as pre-done softwares that provide the sidebars and banners and colored lights and buttons—and each of our sites uses a different one. Jane and Lynn have now worked some changes that we hope will assure the burglar’s key no longer works for anything we use.

Nothing got ‘onto’ your computers, because that’s not what this critter does; and you can’t ‘carry’ it anywhere else, because that’s not how it gets where it goes: just think of it as a burglar prowling around looking for any door its ‘key’ can open, and we just make sure that we have ‘changed the lock’ on every single door and vent and garbage chute, so he’ll have to move on down the alley and leave us alone.