tmccartney66

I'm a former customer thinking about returning to run a small site. I've read elsewhere on the forums that TCH may be ditching Mailman, and I'll need at least a handful of small discussion lists (20 members or less). Is that true? If TCH still supports mailman, how many lists are included in the lowest-priced plan? Thanks, Tracey

I've enjoyed being a customer of TCH - support is great and the family atmosphere gives me the warm fuzzies. Nevertheless, I find myself moving yet another site to another host because of TCH's draconian limitations on e-mail. First of all, let me be clear that there are few people more opposed to spam than I am. But I disagree with TCH's approach to it. I run amysedaris.com, a semi-official fan site for actress/comedian Amy Sedaris. It's a completely non-commercial site except for the Amazon affiliate relationship we have that raises just enough commissions to pay for the site's hosting. Fans ask to be notified by e-mail whenever the news portion of the site is updated. The mailing list currently has 245 addresses, and the blog software I use shoots a notification to all those people whenever there's a new blog entry. Let me repeat - the only people on the list are the people who asked to be, using a form on the site. Yesterday TCH suspended my relaying privileges because it had determined I was sending commercial e-mail without complying with the Can Spam act. TCH never asked whether I was sending spam; it simply determined that I was doing so based on the volume. I already moved another site I run because I was unable to use it for perfectly legitimate civil rights discussion mailing lists, and I found a host that takes a common-sense approach to bulk e-mailing, i.e. determining whether it's spam before limiting your ability to send e-mails. So I'll take amysedaris.com to a new host as well. I still have some sites here, but they are low-traffic sites that use almost no e-mail. I will continue to recommend TCH to people for whom e-mail is not mission-critical, but I won't recommend it for sites that need to use bulk e-mail for legitimate purposes, as I do. Tracey

In the last few days, I've been having some problems with the mailman lists I run on TCH. One has 190 members, and delivery of list e-mails has been extremely sporadic for the last few days. According to the techs looking into this, the problem may be the mail server limit of *** mails per hour, which would, of course, preclude more than one message being sent through this 190-member list in an hour. But if the limit is the problem, why has it just now become a problem? (I'm not convinced it's the problem - it's just really hard to tell right now.) THis is not a terribly high-traffic list, but on its busiest day we might see up to 50 messages during the workday. (This doesn't happen often, certainly.) This listserv has existed for 10 years in one form or another, so it needs to continue. Any ideas for workarounds? We're willing to upgrade to a reseller account if that would make this problem go away. Thanks! (mostly) Tracey

Will do. I didn't want to bother the Help Desk if I was totally off-base about RDNS even being necessary or desirable. Thanks, Tracey

As spelled out in my post here, I'm having trouble getting to Server 90 from work. A check with DNS Stuff shows that the IP address for Server 90 lacks a reverse DNS record. I am wondering whether this might be why my ISP has access to it blocked, or am I barking up the wrong tree? I know a lot of ISPs block mail from mail servers that don't resolve, so I thought the same thing might be going on here. My ISP is looking into it but so far hasn't found that IP address firewalled, so I'm wondering if another rule might be causing problems. Thanks, Tracey

Just what I needed, Don - thanks! Tracey

I've installed Advanced Guestbook and have it running at http://www.amysedaris.com/guestbook . I don't like the little "Thank you for stopping by my site. Here you can leave your mark" thing at the top of the page, but I've searched through all the templates and php and can't find it to get rid of it. Does anyone know where it is? Also, when I get into the template editing form, a little red message tells me to "Give write permissions to the webserver on the template files!" So when chmodding those files, is the "webserver" the owner, group or public? In other words, what should my permissions be? Thanks, Tracey P.S. By the way, e-mail notification of replies doesn't seem to work. Any ideas?

Thanks! Tracey

Does anyone have any info about how permissions should be set on the various folders for Advanced Guestbook? It looks like a nice GB program, but documentation for it appears to be nonexistent. Thanks! Tracey

Ahh - thanks. Scoop is a nice, but complicated, community system used on dailykos - I'd love to run that, but I really don't think it's possible on shared hosting. Most Scoop sites are run on a dedicated server in the webmaster's house. I'm too old to enjoy doing that again.

I like phpBB (built into TCH accounts), but the one thing I don't like about it is that I can't seem to disable automatic pruning. Do you have a favorite (preferably free) message board program? What do you like about it? How hard is it for a non-geek (well, mild geek) to install? Thanks! Tracey Sites on TCH: http://www.amysedaris.com http://www.specialplaceinhell.org http://www.tennfairhousing.org http://www.fairhousingforkerry.org

To give TCH its due -- My clients SWEAR they didn't get the welcome mail, but TCH was Johnny on the Spot resending it. I don't know what happened with the domain registration, but I got them set up with Godaddy, and it's all good. They are very happy with their new web space and their spiffy new "under construction" page. Tracey

I have a directory in my site that I want password protected. I have also set up a subdomain/redirect TO that directory. The weird thing is that users have to type in the username and password TWICE to get the home page of that protected directory to come up. Any idea what the deal is? It's almost like the server is making folks authenticate in order to redirect them and again to open the page. Suggestions welcome...

I have a helpdesk ticket open - I hope to hear something soon. And your post is the first time I've ever seen that domain registration site. I'll probably just register their domain myself with Godaddy.

On Sept. 20, I assisted a fellow fair housing organization to set up a web site with TCH. I just found out from the organization today that the account is probably not set up, and the domain name definitely did not get registered as we requested. I have a couple of other sites with TCH already, and I never had this problem, but I also don't recall my previous purchases going through 2checkout.com. I wonder if there are some coordination problems between 2CO and TCH. It's disappointing, and I'm not sure I'll be able to convince this non-profit to give TCH another chance. Tracey