Current site problems

Herewith an attempt to inform people about the current site problems, the situation is becoming somewhat reminiscent of a Monty Python sketch I'm afraid but I'll do my best to describe it.

Certain anti-virus companies, or it may be just one, has decided in its infinite wisdom that this site is a source of malware, spam or contains phishing links. I can't be precise as to which as they don't tell you. There are only 2 ways I can think of that they can have arrived at this remarkable conclusion as the site contains none of those things and never has. One is that their detection procedures are abysmal and the other is that someone has maliciously made up a set of lies and reported the site. Even if the latter were true (and I hope that it isn't) the anti-virus company has an obligation to check matters and if they had they'd have found nothing.

OK, so then the company that provides our domain is informed of this and proceeds to block the site altogether, without making any attempt whatsoever to check whether the anti-virus company report is in any way correct. They don't bother to inform us of this despite having our email address and we discover it by chance and from messages from a handful of members who let us know there was a problem. All the site admins use the alternative URL of www.spankinglibrary.tk so we were unaware that the co.cc address wasn't working.

I then contacted one of the anti-virus companies which I was aware was saying the site contained malware (or whatever) to explain their mistake. They responded by saying that they couldn't correct any fault because they couldn't access the site any more! So then we find ourselves in a Catch-22 situation.

We have been able to email around 1,000 members so far using our gmail account to inform them of the problem and suggest they use the .tk URL instead, but Google won't allow any more emails to be sent for now, presumably as a fail-safe to prevent spamming. I could have sent all the emails using our own software but then there's the problem of being detected as spam if I do it that way. I also noticed that a number of the email addresses resulted in bounced messages so if the email address you registered with is no longer valid we will need you to provide us with an alternative active email address.

That's about all for now, will update the thread if there are any further developments.

If you are going to post to the thread please keep on topic.

Very frustrating. The bigger fault seems to lie with the company providing the domain.

I do not know if this helps but often when I get an email from Lib admin 1 or 2, the email will often have an accompanying statement beside the address say "this email may not have come from Lib admin1" and then it has a click button that says "read about plishing here". If I re-read the email the next day the sentence has disappeared. It is noteworthy that the same message was not attached to the latest email about tech difficulty's. Cheers

The irony is that this is the company whose domains Google de-indexed (all 11 million plus of them) for allowing sites with malware, spam and phishing links.

All of us who have blogs should immediately create a blog entry that publicizes this site with the new URL. This will help drive traffic back, especially those who are "lost" and can't find us. I just posted such a notice on my blog and it gets a fair amount of traffic.

That's great Rollin, thanks for doing that. I have also changed our URL on Spanking Art Wiki in hopefully most places where there's a link to us. I'm still hopeful that the co.cc URL will be unblocked as I have sent the domain company reports from McAfee, Norton and Web of Trust all showing a clean bill of health for the site. If they choose to ignore all of those then they can go to hell.

Update: sent 11 messages yesterday to the domain company, no reply to any of them but as of a few hours ago I notice that the co.cc URL has been unblocked once again. Hurrah!

Hopefully, now we can get back to business as usual. I'd still recommend that people use the .tk URL to access the site though just in case something unforeseen happens again with the co.cc one. On top of which the .tk URL will show up in Google searches.

Are we sure the govenrment doesn't run the anti-virus companies? That is sooo typical of a government snafu. I remember reading a news article wherein they detailed the laying off of several government computer programmers only to find that some of the important programs (like payroll, etc.) were written in languages that only the laid off workers used.

I appreciated getting an e-mail informing me of the problem. Thanks, Februs.