I have discovered some useful information regarding the recent spam attack, and have put in place some extra countermeasures that, at least for now, have enabled me to switch the Last 10 Updates and new users back on. If you discover further spam please let me know the username as soon as possible so that…
New User Signups are disabled until I can find an appropriate method to block the spammers, my adjustments last night were completely fruitless. I’ve also temporarily disabled the Last Ten Updates because that’s clearly the only place of any interest to them since that’s where the Google Pagerank is. I shall be considering options over…
I have noticed a disturbing new phenomenon for DearDiary – diary spam. There have been a number of instances where diaries are created with entries that are selling something, often from China. This is quite a surprise because it is not all that easy for a new diarist to sign up automatically, and most spammers…
Many of you have already discovered, and e-mailed me to let me know, that there was a slight problem with the notifications leaving the server during last week. Unfortunately the nature of the problem was such that I couldn’t reply to individuals to let them know, because, well, mail to those individuals wasn’t leaving the…
Unfortunately an IP Address change was forced upon me by the hosting provider, which resulted in an outage for some while I figured out a way to get the server to respond to both IP addresses until the DNS updates. Most people probably haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about. Suffice to say if…
I have today added an extra security module to the server which should reduce the ability for spiders (the biggest culprit being BaiduSpider!) to severly cripple the machine by issuing lots of requests in quick succession. The configuration will need some tweaking I’m sure, but if you find yourself getting blocked when you’re trying to…
The server has been moved to a more powerful machine today. In theory no-one will notice any difference because the old server is still serving requests by proxying them through to the new one. The DNS will catch up over the next few days (possibly sooner) and as such everything will hopefully definitely return to…
The HTML editor that is enabled for Plus users is now a configurable option. If you know that you don’t want to use the HTML Editor, for whatever reason, just go to Customize, General Diary Options, Basic Settings and take the tick out of the HTML editor box. You’ll then be reverted to using the…
Plus account holders now have a spivvy whizzy HTML editor in place of the standard textarea, so that you can bold things, and italic them, along with adding smileys , images, links etc etc… All the things you’d find in a good web based HTML editor So, if you’re a Plus user you’ll see the…
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