lilirose

Excellent! Thanks very much, Andy!

Thank you so much for the response, Andy! Unfortunately, blocking the entire domain isn't a good option. The person causing the problem is doing so on a single entry he posted to a large journaling site. Since I'm also a member of the journaling site in question, I don't want to ban all incoming traffic from there- I want to be able to link to my TCH site from my profile on the journaling site, and I also want to allow the journaling site to pick up my TCH-hosted blog's RSS feed. So is there any way to block a single page on a domain without blocking the entire domain?

Someone is linking to one of the pages on my site with the specific intent of insulting me. Is it possible to block incoming traffic that came from the page where that link is posted? I know I can block IPs, but the visitors coming from that page are from all over the world, so IP banning won't help. Thanks in advance...

Bruce, again, I do appreciate the fact that you were trying to be helpful, and thank you for that. It seems obvious to me that I wouldn't have been able to tell you what image was being hotlinked to, since the question I asked was "How do I discover what image is being linked to?" Again, I thank you for your help, my frustration was (and still is) not with you, or with any of the people who were kindly trying to help me; rather I was frustrated that I'm not good at asking questions in a clear enough manner. As I said in my last post, I would have preferred not to simply block the hotlinker for the following reason, stated in my previous post: My apologies to anyone who I have offended due to my poor communications skills.

Jim, I have not had any success in figuring out why AwStats doesn't match my raw log, though it might have something to do with me clearing out the AwStats files before doing a backup a couple of weeks ago- though that doesn't seem right as I didn't remove my raw logs at that time. Andy, my apologies- now that I look back at my AwStats, I see that you are correct. I was matching the wrong line, which was a forum that I do participate in, so I thought I'd got more than 1000 hits from the chinese.cari.com link. My mistake. However, I am a bit curious how you accessed my stats without having my password? I didn't realize they were publicly accessible- or were you able to access it because you're a tech support person? I'm uncomfortable with the idea that anyone can view my stats at will- if there's a way to keep them private, please inform. abinidi, I don't think there's any need to scold me- you misinterpreted my intent. I was frustrated over the fact that I was apparently not communicating clearly, because nobody had given even a simple a "yes" or "no" answer to the question I asked twice. I do realise that the volunteers here were trying to help, but they were going to great lengths to give me information I hadn't asked for, so it seemed obvious to me that I wasn't making myself understood. Just for the record, I know that a lot of people who hotlink do so out of ignorance of copyright issues and the fact that bandwidth costs money, and thus my preferred solution would have been to discover which image was being hotlinked, so I could replace it with another image asking the hotlinker not to steal bandwidth. I thought it might have discouraged the hotlinker from doing the same thing to someone else in future. Maybe I should have said that in my OP but I was trying to be as succinct as possible so that I could get a clear answer to a clear question.

Andy, I'm not positive it's an image being hotlinked- it's just a hunch, because of repeated hits coming from a forum that I've never visited. The URL I'm getting from AwStats is ht_p://chinese.cari.com.my/myforum/viewthread.php . I can't find that URL or any portion of it in my raw access logs despite repeated searches. Oh well. I've turned Hotlink Protection on and will add the forums that I post photos to manually...I suppose it's better than letting strangers eat my bandwidth. Thanks for the help, all.

*sigh* I must be wording my question really badly or something, since the only one of you who even tried to answer my question ("How do I figure out which image they are hotlinking?") apparently didn't read the part of my OP where I said I'm not sure where AwStats is coming up with the URL if it's not in my raw access logs, though. It's quite a mystery.

I'm aware of the various ways to block the offending forum from accessing my site- that's not the question I'm asking. I want to know if there is a way to tell exactly which image is being hotlinked. Can anyone answer that question?

Yeah, I know it's possible to edit .htaccess in order to block that forum. Still, I want to know which image is being linked to. Is there no way to tell?

I was looking over my site's stats in AwStats recently and discovered that I had nearly a thousand hits from a Chinese forum. The link in AwStats was to a viewthread.php page, rather than showing me directly the exact thread or threads in that forum which sent all these visitors. I suspect an image from my site is being hotlinked by a user on this forum. What I'm trying to figure out is how to discover exactly which image is being hotlinked. AwStats does not tell me, and I've gone over my raw access logs searching for the relevant URL with no luck. The URL is not currently in my "Latest Visitor" logs, either. I have Hotlink Protection turned OFF and I wish to leave it that way, because both my husband and I often use images from my site on various forums that we participate in, and want to be able to do so without having to go into Cpanel and add the URL to Hotlink Protection's "allowed" list each time we do so. It's far easier for me to remove or rename images that are being illegally linked- it's only happened once before, and that time the image was in my "Latest Visitors" log. Is there a way for me to find out which of my images is being stolen without checking my "Latest Visitors" logs multiple times each day?

Thanks for that, Mark- deleting those AwStats files reduced the size of my backup tarball by 16 megabytes- that's a little puzzling in itself, since they were all text files and I thought .tar.gz was a compressed format? In any case, you've saved me at least an hour of downloading time, so I apprecate it!

I just discovered that the second biggest file I have in my site's home directory is tmp/awstats, at 16.15 megabytes. That seems really excessive to me. I'm wanting to create and download a backup but I want to clean out any unnecessary files first, because I'm on dial-up and it will take me hours to download the tarball. Will anything bad happen if I delete this huge AwStats file? I'm not really very interested in my stats at the moment anyway, because I've given up having a public blog and am only running a couple of small members-only forums.

I cannot say enough good things about SMF. I recommend it highly. It has features that even the more expensive paid boards do not. When I switched from phpBB to SMF, my bandwidth for that month dropped significantly (by over 50%) even though my forum was still doing the same amount of traffic. My forum had approx 250 users and we never had trouble with speed at any time. I gave up my forum a couple of weeks ago because the admin/moderating/forum drama thing was too much for me to deal with, but I still recommend SMF above all other software. Edited to fix typo

I've been with TCH for six months now, after having an extremely bad experience with my previous host. I am not what you would call an "easy-to-please" customer- I am only satisfied with the very best- yet I have never ceased to be impressed with the service I receive from TCH. My site has experienced no more than a few minutes' downtime total in the past six months, and both the TCH forums and help desk are staffed with the best tech support crew that I've run into anywhere in my ten years on the Net. Every time I've had a question or concern it's been dealt with very quickly, even on the one occasion that I had a problem at 5 AM on a Sunday morning- TCH were there for me. Recently I had a problem with my email, and TCH's tech support were always helpful and friendly, even when I was becoming extremely frustrated. I was also impressed with the fact that they continually respected my intelligence reather than talking down to me or giving "scripted" answers, as is unfortunately too common in the world of tech support. It turned out that the problem was on my end (originating with my ISP), but at every stage, TCH techs were polite, well-informed, and knowledgeable. I highly recommend TCH to anyone, at any level of experience, who is looking for the finest in web hosting.

Thanks for all the ideas for my 403 page, ya'll. The one Tommy sent is a gem...I think I'll have to do something similar.

I entered it into Cpanel with the asterisk (*) symbol, and CPanel actually removed the symbol. According to my acccess logs it's working- the person I was trying to ban is getting my 403 page instead of seeing my site. Thanks for the help!

I am trying to ban a certain person from accessing my website. They appear to be on dial-up, so their IP changes frequently, but it's always with a given range. Let's say, for example, all of this person's various IP addresses start 123.456.xxx.xxx With "xxx" being the part that changes. What exactly do I need to enter into Cpanel's IP Deny Manager to ban all of the IPs this person is using? Should I do it like this: 123.456.* or 123.456.*.* Or should it be something else? Thanks in advance for your help!

Thank you, David. I believe this a recent policy change. I apreciate being updated, and I apologize for passing on less-than-current information. BTW, since we have this cleared up, my husband says that he would be more than happy to do the installation for you for a small fee, if nobody else has offered.

It's almost 2 AM here and I'm having trouble digging through the MT TOS, which is written in legalese, of course- to find the exact clause that prohibits it. I'm a paid user of MT, so I opened a ticket with their tech support to ask about it. I'll post back here as soon as I get a response from them.

Um, I don't mean to be a jerk or anything, but offering to pay someone who is not employed by Six Apart to install MT for you is expressly against the license you must agree to when downloading Movable Type. So, basically, what you are asking for is illegal. I'm really surprised that nobody else on this forum has pointed this out to you. Sorry. There are other content magagement systems available that are much easier to install if you are unable to install MT yourself, but paying someone to install MT for you is a no-no.

According to the MozillaZine forums, they will be adding this new release to Firefox's automatic software update in a day or two. They need a bit more time to get it packaged in a way that will work with the auto update. I guess they could have kept the new version under wraps until they had the auto-update version working, but I personally don't have a problem with the fact that they released the "install manually" version first, since we're talking about free, open-source software.

Thanks so much for your quick response, Bruce. I am using Spam Assassin, but the way I have it configured right now, it delivers all the messages tagged as spam to my e-mail program, where I use a filter to put them into a junk-mail folder, so I can check them and make sure that none of them were tagged by mistake (it does happen occasionally). So that would be no better than simply setting up a filter to auto-trash this person's mail. Is there a better way? Again, I appreciate your help so much!

I seem to attract weirdos, for some reason. A polite debate with someone via e-mail has degenerated into a flame war- or, to be more precise, they are flaming me, despite the fact that I've done my best to remain polite. So anyway...my question. Is there a way to block this person's e-mail address at the server level, so that when they e-mail me again, their mail will either be bounced or deleted from the server without me having to look at it? I know I can do this within my e-mail program using filters... I don't really want to use that method, because that will just put the e-mail into my "trash" folder, and I know I won't be able to resist looking for it, reading it, and getting extremely upset over the whole situation once again. I know that's silly, and I should have more strength of will than that, but I don't. So please try to forgive me for that and help me out anyway. I just want to figure out a way to stop e-mails from this person from ever making it onto my computer at all. So...is there any way to permanently blacklist someone's e-mail address at the server level?

I'm running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 installed. It's not so much that I am having any specific problems- the thing that annoys my husband and I is this: the only way to keep a Windows computer running smoothly, in our experience, is to keep all important data on seperate partitions of the hard drive, so you can easily reformat the hard drive and reinstall a fresh copy of Windows every four or five months when it starts to bog down. I know this is kind of a "slash-and-burn" approach but even with our many years of experience in the computer business, we have not found a better way. I did my standard reformat and reinstall routine this week, and on my 64K single channel ISDN connection, it took more than 24 hours to download and install all the updates to WinXP, which really ticked me off. My computer is running fine now, but I would dearly love to stop going through this rigamorole two or three times a year. Thanks so much for the responses so far- you guys are great! (edited to fix a couple of typos)

I've had it with Windows and Microsoft at this point. I don't think I even need to explain why- anyone who's run a Windows machine knows of which I speak. I'm thinking of switching to Linux. I'm not a complete dunce when it comes to computers- my husband and I used to own a computer shop where we built and repaired PCs, so we know our way around hardware and software pretty well. We had a computer running SuSe, and later Mandrake, about four years ago, but we gave up on it because we couldn't get it to do everything we needed our PCs to do, and because it was just too difficult for us to install new software on it, after years of being spoiled by Windows. I understand that nowadays there are newer releases which are easier for someone who is just getting started with Linux. So, to my questions: Do any of you have an opinion on which distribution is the most newbie-friendly and user-friendly? Also, can any of you point me to a book or website that will help us to learn Linux?