Deverill

Welcome to the forums! It's a good thing Andy can understand Chinese... way to go Andy!

You forgot Gmail . It's not a client but I send all my mail from my TCH accounts to Gmail - 2 gigs plus of storage and awesome ability to search for anything I'm looking for without having to hunt through folders... it makes a great archive.

I don't know much about the Macs, but for hardcore video editing I'd bet that there is no software that comes with any flavor of a WinPC for free that is up to the task so if you go that route factor in the cost of a production suite.

You can find the PC/MAC stinks arguments all over the net so everyone let's refrain from that here... Sigmadog has a great point though - at work we have marketing folks that use Mac's and one person got an Imac and had all kinds of problems - the info I got on the net was that anyone doing what this person was doing (just basic graphics for print and web) would be a fool to use an Imac and a G4 would be the least they needed. Now, this is specific to a particular issue and does not apply to everything but the point is that you need to make sure the machines are powerful enough to do what you need. My vote would be to do what you feel the most comfortable with. From what I've seen any good software on the MAC can be found for the PC, or a reasonable replacement at least. Consider the programs you like and if they are available, which you are most comfortable with and the abilities of each, the cost of each and decide what sounds the best to you -- after all, you have to live with your choice.

You can use your email filtering to delete anything that comes in. Sorry I don't have the proper syntax but it would be using a regex where subject matches anything - go to discard.

Don's advice is great advice. The benefit of that is that your server, which processes the form, is the only one that knows your email address in the end - you aren't trusting their browser to keep it quiet or anything. Also, make sure you have a way to get new addresses if one becomes trashed - it's harder with a business address but for personal stuff it's easy - 1@mytchacct.com, 2@mytchacct.com, spam@mytchacct.com (for web signups I don't ever want to hear from again), etc. Most of the time, if someone says you are spamming them and you aren't, it's just cuz someone has scammed/harvested your email address. Too bad the end-recipients don't always get it though.

I'm not sure about the meta redirect. Sorry. You could at least put a nice link on the old site to the new one so when Google crawls your old site it will "find" the new one and hopefully crawl it quickly and often. The main issue with search engines is that nothing happens quickly so you may just have to wait it out. When I get a chance I'll try to find out something about the redirect.

Send him back an email saying: All emails from the address: xyz@abc.com are being ignored. Your message has been immediately and automatically deleted and has not been forwarded or viewed by any human. At least that's what I'd do. Then follow up with Bill's advice on the help desk ticket to abuse and you may even want to aggressively protect your site with constant monitoring and disabling guestbooks temporarily, etc. If he does go to the police then he'd be doing you a favor. It's like the lady that snotched the keys from the getaway car the guys were using to rob her - they called the police and she told them what happened and they went to jail. If you want to get into it, remind him that you are not obligated to allow any links to your site or to link to any other and unless something untrue shows up on YOUR site about this bozo it's not your problem.

Wow, finally I'm back online. Talk about withdrawals! First, I'm glad Steve that you are fine and hopefully your home will be too. You said your answering machine was still working and I thought how ironic it would be for someone checking on their home that way to return to just a concrete foundation and an answering machine. I'm glad we won't have to worry about that in your area! The storm did move quickly and was a bit off shore for us but we still had 100+ MPH wind gusts at times. The power went off at my place around 11AM Friday and just came back on Sunday at about 4PM. At least the wind was blowing and it was cool - after Georges it was dead-still and hot. At my place 17 miles NE of Key West proper we had 2 little trees break but that was really all the damage I've seen so far. In town there is a lot more debris and broken tree limbs but still no fallen trees or major structural damage that I saw. About the worst was a "construction wall" they build between worksites and the sidewalk to keep folks safe - about 30 feet of one of those was blown over. It was kinda scary though to be in an untested home (brand new) with all that gosh-aweful roaring going on. You know on the news ppl say "It sounded like a freight train." Phooey! It sounded like a hurricane - not a train! I hope everyone "up north" stays safe and returns to undamaged homes. Thanks to the family for the prayers.

True that, Samrc. I just walked thru the living room and the tv is on the Weather Channel (Doh!) and Cantori said "The silver lining is that the hurricane has stalled over land." Oh, so the official weather channel stance is that the fact that tens of thousands of Cubans, many of whom live in abject poverty, that can barely make homes, muchless strong ones or heaven forbid add hurricane shutters, getting slammed by a category 4 hurricane for hours on end is a silver lining? Puhlease! Someone monitor these soundbyte-notoriety hounding fools before the clip goes on the air! Sorry for the rant - again - but that really bothered me. The only connection I have with Cuba is that people live there - human beings - I have no family or friends there - but that's enough! How heartless can we appear?!?

That's why Dennis is heading straight there.... REVENGE on the annoying Weather Channel guy.

Thanks for the link, that's an interesting service. You probably will benefit from fresh content anyway so that sounds like a good plan to me. Good luck with it!

Hi Tramadius. The mystery url's may be dynamic ones generated by a script such as your validator - they may have been temporary addresses that Google picked up on. The other sites with duplicate content, if it is nealy exact, could be considered as a scam by you to get unwaranted traffic, but anyone who did that on purpose would only risk diluting their ranking anyway. The actions you have taken with the 301, absolute links and removing dupes are all good and should pay off in the end. With search engines you must be patient, do the right thing and wait for it to turn around for you. We are at their mercy so do the best you can and don't be tempted by the fad-of-the-day to try to "fix" it.

What can anyone say in a time like this. My prayers to all who have to deal with these gutless chicken-crap dogs that choose to exhibit their disagreement with covert, faceless, from-a-distance acts of cowardice. We (all) shall prevail! Stay strong and know you are all in the thoughts and prayers of millions.

Guys, sorry I've been scarce around here. I spent this morning getting hurricane shutters up on my new house. Still have the balcony doors to finish before it gets so nasty. I feel more for the folks on the mainland though - so much pain last year and here it is again. I've decided to stay but it won't be fun when the power goes out... we have 150 miles of electric lines providing power from the mainland so it's almost sure to go out. All you guys stay safe up there and I'll check in as possible too. Maybe it'll just dissipate - yeah right. It's a cat 4 which is very serious so everyone do what you have to. Jack, you are sure right! I was just watching the weather channel thinking the same things. Of course now they have that annoying "air horn" beeping nonsense when there's an alert - gee, you think we know there's a thunderstorm warning right now? I don't think you need to keep wanking at us about it. Besides, all they are saying is that there are no flights and one airline has an extra one and there are no rental cars left. Weather channel stinks -- I use the net when I can cuz of al the fluff, which is another thing... I know they have to pay the bills, but I really don't care about One-A-Day wank-wank-wank Zora's diet pills wank-wank-wank (that buzzer thing is getting to me), weathzak - the weather channel's version of muzak... Lessee - local on the 8's - rain and 80 in Key West - nearshore waters becoming very rough (you think?) - rainfall may reach one inch (no! Really?) wank-wank-wank Sat chance of rain 90% (In a hurricane? You don't say). Thanks Jack - you got me wound up now. lol

I'm no htaccess guru but I did notice that in the original, David had >RewriteRule .* alt-file.html and you have >RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ - [F,NC] It seems quite a bit different to my novice eyes.

Your information is given away freely so you'd not have any recourse legally... but... I'd make sure that my site's name and the fact that it is free to everyone and the web site address was plastered on every page... they pay him, find your info, and don't pay him again. Sounds fair to me David's technique is a good one that you can use to link to a page that says "Here I am, I'm free and you've been ripped off" (however tactfully you wish to say it.) Don't forget that by optimizing your site for the search engines you may be able to "steal" some of the folks that would have gone to his site. If someone enters "Help for XYZ Widgets" then get them to your site first and he'll reap what he has sown.

Hi Booj, It looks fine here on Linux Firefox as well. Perhaps there is a problem with your browser? Maybe an upgrade that went wrong is responsible. Have you tried other browsers?

Thomas, I have that problem a lot if I go to read an email and then hit the back button instead of clicking on "Inbox". Other than that it's usually not a problem... just stay away from the normal back and forward buttons. Glad the Https worked - I may have to try that myself to see if it fixes my back button.

Welcome to the forums, netmasterbill!

There are no automatic robots.txt file but the web crawlers (spiders) automatically assume everything is ok to look at. If you have no robots file then they will crawl all over your site and they will index you as well as possible. You would only need a robots.txt file to ask them to skip over certain pages or sections.

Welcome, Mark, and thanks for helping make TotalChoce Hosting the best supported host I've ever seen.

I program databases and fix systems for a tourism company - narrated trolley rides around towns in 5 states and souvenir shops in those same towns. I have a BA in Comp Sci with a Math Emphasis from Bellarmine University in Louisville, KY. I also do website design and hosting for a small number of customers.

Personally I don't think that kind of system is practical for most businesses. The reason is that most customers won't want to be bothered with a challenge-response delay and most businesses won't want to put their customers through it. Besides, it seems like a spammer could read the challenge and auto-send a response too. If it fits into one's business model then it would indeed be a great start. For most personal email users it may also be good but remember this - I get notices that my Bank of America is due - if I forgot to get them on the whitelist I may never see the billing notice because they will certainly not respond to my challenge. Everyone's situation and needs are different - it's all about building your perfect toolbox and using it to the fullest. Thanks for the suggestion!

My understanding is that the forwarders grab the mail before Spam Assassin gets a shot at it, but I am not positive on that. Someone should be by soon with a definitive answer... the techs don't get to visit the forums as much as us mods so that's probably why no one has said for sure.