A few pieces of news.

I’ve reinstated blank referrer support for multimedia files.  Unfortunately, despite the significant theft taking place because of that setting, restricting the files for non-referrer requests appears to have shot many legitimate visitors as well as the thieving heathens.  I’ll continue looking at that little issue in hopes of finding a different way to protect my bandwidth and property.

There is a minor site upgrade I need to perform that could mean a few hiccups here and there.  I’ll complete the upgrade this afternoon.  If all goes well, you won’t notice a thing.

In the same breath, I need to perform some server upgrades which could be slightly more disruptive than the site upgrades.  Again, I’ll try to keep the disruptions minimized.

Finally, I’ve disabled the article e-mail function.  Spammers have discovered it and began using it for nefarious purposes.  In the last day alone, they have generated some 2,500 outbound messages with their own spam comments included.  Since the logs indicate the function wasn’t used that often, and also because it’s just as easy to copy the URI and paste it into an e-mail, I don’t believe this change will be too catastrophic for anyone except the spammers.

Isn’t it amazing how ignorant fools can make things so difficult for everyone else?  Sometimes I have to wonder if it’s worth the trouble…