Gary

Hi, Shetlopedia was hacked and they really made a mess of the website; also shetlanddictionary.com was affected. Unfortunately a lack of time and expertise has meant that the website didn't get back up and running; although we still hold the backups for the website and we're keen to get it back. We're looking at the possibility of getting it back online very soon; and then we'll be looking for people to help as administrators on the website. We'll also be looking for people with the expertise to prevent similar sort of hacking happening again. It may be that we have to pay a company to host the site for us and to take responsibility for the security of it; or we may find someone willing to help us out. Shetlopedia and ShetlandDictionary.com have always been free from any sort of advertising or income, and we're planning to continue that way; although we have considered the possibility of allowing limited advertising with the income going directly to one or more Shetland based charities which would be chosen by Shetlopedia's members. I'd be interested to hear peoples thoughts on this; and how they would see it working. A budget has been set aside to get Shetlopedia and ShetlandDictionary.com back online and hosted securely. It now just requires some time and effort to make it happen. You can contact me (Gary Johnson) on the Shetlopedia admin email address (admin - at - shetlopedia . com) and let me know if you have any questions. And if you're interested in volunteering in any capacity (administrator, contributor, marketing, website security expert) then please get in touch and let me know. We're hoping that the website will be back online by the end of the year; and open for people to edit. Many thanks, Gary Johnson

It seems that Shetlopedia was hacked by some fairly persistent hackers. The logs show that the IP addresses involved were working on it for some time; and that they were finally succesful. The website was taken down for maintenance recently, and that involved freezing the website so that no edits could be made and new user creation was disabled. This was a response to the spam attacks we've been suffering on the website over the past few months. We upgraded to the latest PHP and Mediawiki versions, but continued to have some issues. The recent spam attack was more serious though, and appears to be the hackers taking advantage of a vulnerability in the recent MediaWiki build. The website has been rolled back to the pre-hack stage. We have also locked it down completely so that no access by the hackers can be made. We're reviewing the website security to prevent this happening again. We're also investigating the possibility of paying for a specialist, managed MediaWiki service to host Shetlopedia. A company that will handle all software installations, upgrades and security. Apologies for any inconvenience caused. We hope to have Shetlopedia back online as soon as possible, but only when we're happy that the website is once again secure. In the meantime, if you have any questions or concerns regarding Shetlopedia or ShetlandDictionary.com, then please email us on admin (at) shetlopeida (dot) com. Regards, Gary

Hi Malachy, Thanks for letting us know about the problem. Sorry for the delay in replying, but I only saw the message today. I'm not seeing the same issue, but I'm looking into it. I'm not sure why you'd get an adware warning, there is definately no adware on the website. Could you please email me (admin at shetlopedia.com) with the exact error message so I can look into it for you? It's worth trying Ghostrider's suggestion of deleting the cookies in your browser in case one of them has become corrupted. Please let me know if this works. I've tried going through Firefox and it works fine for me. I also have Spyware Doctor installed as well. I'll look into it though and I'll try to replicate the problem; but so far I've had no luck. Let me know how you get on with deleting the cookies. Also, could you try going directly to http://shetlopedia.com/Main_Page and see if that works. Thanks, Gary

Thanks Islandhopper. Sadly that's how it is. A number of articles from Shetlopedia have been copied on to Wikipedia with a comment on the bottom along the lines of "This article incorporates text from the article on Shetlopedia" In most cases 100% of the article is copied and pasted from Shetlopedia, with no changes made by the Wikipedia 'author'; not even internal page-link corrections in some cases. No mention of the Shetlopedia author or authors names are provided. As Wikipedia seemed to be copying new articles every few days, eventually there would be nothing left on Shetlopedia that you couldn't find on Wikipedia or one of its many mirror websites. We didn't want Shetlopedia to be lost amongst all of this, so we stopped them from copying. Fjool, thanks for your comments. The change to the copyright was made on Friday to prevent a weekend of Wikipedia copying. We're now looking at suitable licenses for Shetlopedia, and talking to some people who know a little more about copyright law. Regards Gary

Freyr, The decision to change to 'all rights reserved' was made last week in order to prevent the copying of Shetlopedia content onto other websites. So much of the Shetlopedia content was being copied that we decided to make this change. The contributors to Shetlopedia have done a lot of work over the past year, and it would be disappointing for other websites to take the credit for their work. For that reason we made the change to the licensing. Contributors retain the copyright of their own articles and photos. The new license being worked out at them moment will show that the author/photographers will retain the copyright. Anyone who wants to use any of that work will have to get permission from the authors first. Shetlopedia will not own the content, the people who write it will. Shetlopedia is a non profit website run by the people who contribut to it. We do not display advertising, and we do not raise money in any way. If you have any further questions, please feel free to get in touch. Best regards Gary

Maybe, but human spammers will concentrate on websites that make it easy for them. If you make it a little bit more difficult for them to post their links, they're more likely to bother someone else instead. If they have to register a new user and then post a few posts (without being deleted first), before they can post their links, then it might put some of them off. You can also install a mod that prevents them from posting links until they've been registered for a period of time specified by the website. A combined approach like that might work. They have to post 10 messages before being allowed to post links, and they also have to wait a week. By that time you would have hopefully recognised their messages as spam and deleted or suspended the user. This would be less inconvenient for everyone than manually approving each registration. Anyway, just my thoughts.

Bryan, I will PM you the details later on when I'm back at my own PC. There is also a mod that prevents new users from posting website links on the forum until their message count reaches a certain level. So if they do manage to register their account, they can't immediately post website links. Spam has been a problem recently on the websites, but a few recent changes has almost stopped it. I'm sure the spammers will find away around it soon, but we'll just have to try and stay one step ahead of them. Cheers Gary

Bryan, The Shetlopedia forums were getting a lot of spam for a while. We tried different captcha's and plug-in's but none of them were much use. We were getting around 20 new spam registrations each day, and an occasional posting from them. A few months ago I found a photo-captcha which displays a few photos when registering, and asks the user to tick the box of any photos containing animals. If the incorrect boxes are checked then the registration fails. The photos are randomly displayed, and you can replace the standard photos with your own. Since installing it we've had no spam registrations, and users registering manually have still managed to register. I can see in the logs that we sill have these spammers trying to register, but so far none of them have been succesful. The Shetland Amateur Radio forums (http://www.gm3zet.org/phpBB2/index.php) have also installed this plug-in, and as far as I know it's helped them prevent the automated spam. If you want to get rid of the spam registrations (the automated ones at least) then this is the only thing that has worked for us. You can download this from the PHPBB website, or I can email it onto you if you're interested. By the way, the new-look Shetlink is looking good. Well done. Cheers Gary

Wolfgang, It's almost there now, but having problems with the images. Do you see the website now? Cheers Gary

We've had some big problems with the hosting of Shetlopedia and ShetlandDictionary. On Wednesday the hosting company just closed down and disappeared, no warning from anyone. It's not just Shetlopedia and ShetlandDictionary that were affected, but a few hundred other websites as well. I've spoken with the owners of a few of them, and they're all in the same position. The hosting company wont respond to emails and they wont answer their phones. I have an address for them which I'll be visiting next week, but I don't expect to find anyone there. The good news is that I had taken a backup of both websites last Saturday evening. We've still lost the work done on the wiki's between Sunday and Wednesday, but those were very quiet days for the websites anyway. It's unfortunate, but unless we can get the backups from the hosts, then we'll not be able to recover those changes. I spent a couple of days finding new hosts, making sure that the new hosts were well established and had good references. I am restoring the backups onto these new servers just now, and hope to get it completed by tomorrow. If you go to http://www.shetlopedia.com, you should see the temporary front page for Shetlopedia. (if you don't then refresh the page). This has a link to click on which will take you to Shetlopedia. There are a lot of things still to restore, a lot of settings that were changed on the old site and lots of files to upload. Hopefully this will be completed by tomorrow. After Shetlopedia, I'll be restoring ShetlandDictionary.com. Apologies for any inconvenience this has caused. Gary

http://www.shetlopedia.com and http://www.shetlanddictionary.com should now both be back online, and a new hosting company in place. Cheers Gary

I've been busy finding a new host and I'm hoping to move the websites today and tomorrow. The other hosts messed up, and then went away for Christmas without sorting it out. Anyway, Merry Christmas to everyone on Shetlopedia, ShetlandDictionary, Shetlink and everywhere else. Cheers Gary

http://www.shetlopedia.com and http://www.shetlanddictionary.com are both down at the moment. There are some server issues just now which are being looked into. The hosts attempted to upgrade to the latest version of php, but instead they've stopped any website that uses php from working. They've assured me that they will sort this out very soon, or they will roll-back to the latest version of php. Gary

I have a Samsung YP-K5 It's only 4GB and it's a bit chunky, but it has a built in speaker, FM radio, alarm clock and sleep timer. The sound from the built in speaker is surprisingly good. I'd recommend it, but only if you find the built in speaker useful. I use it when I'm travelling. If you wont use the built in speaker, then get something more compact. http://www.samsung.com/Products/MP3Player/MP3Player/YP_K5JABXAA.asp http://technology.guardian.co.uk/innovations/story/0,,1871472,00.html I also have an Archos AV500 100GB Multimedia Player http://www.amazon.com/Archos-AV500-Multimedia-Player-DVR/dp/B000AQDOKM Great for watching films on when you're travelling, also has a built in speaker. Gary

There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't