Lee reports that his security software wouldn't let him log in last night.
I checked at first when I got the message, and there weren't any reported problems with the site. Then I dug a little deeper, and discovered something that MIGHT have raised a red flag if your software was set to "maximum paranoia" level or whatever you call it. Here's the note I sent back to Lee:
As far as I can tell, it's a reporting problem in a webcrawler Google uses. The forum software generates temporary links all day long because it's constantly having to move the "pointers" as more content is added. Unfortunately, a webcrawler that reports "404 errors" - missing links - to Google was capturing those links and treating them as permanent, then acting like something was wrong when a dynamic link that worked a week ago doesn't work now. So Google reported 76 bad links, enough to report the site as what my forefathers would call "tetchy."
I've put in a robots.txt file that should reduce Google's attempts to test outdated dynamic links. We'll see.
That said, there WERE a few actual missing links in our archive of Papa Ted's site - Ted's indexing scheme was - shall we say - inconsistent. And there are several pages that he only had one link to buried in a footnote or something. I'm still coming across those "hidden" contents. The webcrawler found several html files in that category as well, and I've made certain that material was available to readers now.
One day, I may create an index to all the topics that are buried in hard-to-find pages on the archive. In the meantime, I'm glad that the webcrawler helped me track down a few more elusive materials.
Another goofy thing - the capitalization of Ted's file names was also inconsistent. On a Windows server you get away with links to Putz08.html, putz08.html, and PUTZ08.html. One my linux servers, there NEEDS to be a file with that exact name or you'll get a "404" message. So now, if you could see the web server folder containing Ted's files, you'd see that several files exist multiple times with variations on their capitalization, depending on how the links to them are set up.
That is in addition to the fact that Ted also had multiple "home," "default," "index," and "contents" files (with slightly different filename spellings, etc.) that mostly overlapped in content. You have probably never noticed, but when you clicked the "home" or "contents" button on one page, you might actually get to a DIFFERENT "Home" or "Contents" page than if you clicked an identical button on another page.
I've kept all of those redundant pages alive, since tracking down all the links to them would be a nightmare. But if you click on a link in the archive and you get a 404 (not found) error, or if it takes you someplace really weird, please let me know.
Sorry, you can go back to talking about putz houses now.
