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You know, I hate to talk about my webhost badly, but sometimes ATSPACE drives me insane. For the most part, they provide excellent service, but there's one thing that has repeatedly spoiled my day, not to mention wasted countless hours of my time: the word filter. I understand what it is there for, and don't have anything against it. Filtering words to prevent ATSPACE hosted sites from being used to phish people is admirable. The problem lies in the fact that it has repeatedly caused me to have to dig through code to try to figure out what word has caused a page that worked fine days before to suddenly throw a 500 error. As far as I know, ATSPACE doesn't publish a list of blocked words, so I am left digging and guessing. If Andyville was a single page website, this would not be a problem, but it most certainly is not. |
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Today, I was checking in on Andyville, and I discovered that the index was not loading the title area. That immediately told me that the script file for the index had a problem. Upon directly attempting to access the script file via the browser, I got a 500 error. After about 45 minutes of hack and slashing my wonderful code, trying to eliminate the flagged word, I discovered that it was part of a quote from old Andyville that was the culprit. Due to the word filter still being in use, I'll just have to spell it out for you. Ready? M S N ... or, as it will from now on be referred to in every occurence on Andyville, [the bad M word with the SN]. Of course, it wasn't JUST in the script file. [the bad M word with the SN] was also mentioned in the Panda Porn article and in the Naked Ninja Girls Day article, which I have had to "patch" with the preferred reference. [the bad M word with the SN]? Really? I could see how phishermen (term credit: Ninja Andy) might want to use the term to steal [the bad M word with the SN] passwords and the like, but it is a very commonly used word. I mean, there's [the bad M word with the SN] Messenger, [the bad M word with the SN] Explorer, [the bad M word with the SN] Internet Access, news articles that could be cited from [the bad M word with the SN]... there's a lot there. It's not like the other bad M word referring to a space that you may have. This is something people will use fairly commonly even if they're not a spammer or phisherman. Anyway, talking about this is doing no good... |
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I mainly wrote this to lend some explanation to why you'll see [the bad M word with the SN] splashed all over Andyville. Of course, after all the time wasted due to this, maybe I just wanted to vent on ATSPACE a bit. How hard would a simple list of banned words be to publish? How hard would a few days warning be before they add a new word to the list? These are the things that make me wish Andyville had its own public dedicated server. Well, I'm off to do the 3000 other things that are far more important than Andyville, but have been delayed due to it. Have a great day, readers. Big Cray: Accept No Substitute |
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