Site Bug Report: Read this first if you're having problems

Posts: 584 · Posted: Sun Aug 17, 2003 2:44 pm

If the "autologin" feature has not been working for you, trying deleting your cookies and see if this fixes the problem (in Internet Explorer, go to Tools / Internet Options / General tab / Delete Cookies).

Posts: 584 · Posted: Tue Apr 27, 2004 11:30 pm

Some people have reported not being able to view images on the main site since last week. If that's the case for you, you need to configure your firewall (Norton Firewall is the most notorious culprit) to allow referrers from this site. The configuration setting should be found in your Privacy preferences.

The long explanation of this is that we've disabled "hotlinking" to The Acaeum, which has been consuming unnecessary bandwidth. Disabling hotlinking has also, unfortunately, been causing image errors for some users. Hotlinking is when someone uses an image from The Acaeum by remotely linking it, rather than saving the image to their hard drive, and uploading it to their own server. For example, in this image tag: <img src="wolf.jpg"> the image is pulled from the person's own server, but in this image tag: <img src="http://www.acaeum.com/images/wolf.jpg">, it is pulled from The Acaeum's server. Therefore, every time someone views the image on your web site, your server is consuming The Acaeum's bandwidth in loading the image.

Should you be having further problems in configuring your privacy/referrer settings in your firewall, please contact webmaster@acaeum.com (and hopefully I can help).

Posts: 584 · Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2005 2:31 am

I shouldn't have to say this -- but I will just so there's no misunderstandings. For quite some time now, we've implemented various tools which allow us to see when people are attacking our servers. By "attack", I mean attempt to gain unauthorized information or access, or to otherwise exploit loopholes in various pieces of server software.

The penalty for getting caught -- and frankly, I will catch you -- is to be banned from both the forums and the main site. There will be no warning given. On average, I've been banning roughly one person every two days.

My guess is, the vast majority of "hackers" (read: "script kiddies") aren't going to read this anyway -- and in fact, this message isn't for them. It's for those of you who may be bored one day, and decide to try out the latest exploit yourself, just to see what happens. My advice: don't. You won't be accessing this site again.

Sorry for such a harsh message, but I figured I'd best be fair about this, and discourage casual experimenting. My tolerance for people screwing around with the forum/site is somewhere less than zero, after the hacking incident two years ago which caused no small amount of grief in bringing the site back up.

Foul