David MacDougall's blog

I apologize for having to add a minor inconvenience to some of our forms but we're getting five or six e-mails a day from people trying to sell diet pills and other such things. The e-mails are most likely being generated by spam "bots" or programs written specifically to send spam e-mail through contact forms. An additional step has been added in which the sender will need to type in letters presented in an image that is generated on the fly. I hope this cuts down on the spam e-mails to myself and the membership chairman.
Take care,
 David

The new site has been up for two weeks now and there seem to be very few problems.

I see new users joining steadily.

There has been some confusion about why posts or comments don't appear right away. We're moderating forum posts or comments for general users. Those who are verified members of Clan MacDougall Society of North America will be able to post without moderation, but it may take a day or more for me to log in and manually upgrade the user status to Society Member.

In looking through the logs, I've seen a few "spambot" attacks, but this system tracks the IP numbers and I am able to "ban" the miscreants before they can wreak much havoc.

The new site has been up for 24 hours and I've seen no major catastrophes yet. Several new users have registered. So far, I haven't seen any "fake" registrations from spammers. I have noticed that the black text in the left-hand column is hard to read on some monitors, so I will likely be making adjustments there in the days ahead.

Hello to all,
As we migrate to the new version of the Web site, I am eager to hear any comments or criticism.
The decision to switch to a new format was made for several reasons.
First, our old site's layout and structure has been around since 1996 in one form or another. From 1996 until 1998, we were at charleston.net/org/clanmacdougall/ and in 1998 we moved to www.macdougall.org but the overall look and feel of the site has remained much the same.
Second, and perhaps the most compelling reason from my point of view, was the inadequacy of the Forums software that we've been using since about 2003. The old Message Forums were hacked and defaced in 2005, with the hacker removing ALL of the previous messages. The membership database was left intact, but with no posts, the forum was back to square one. A newer version of the same software was installed, with this version having greater security measures to prevent hacking, but it continues to present a problem in that "SpamBot" scripts are constantly trying to register new "users" with the sole purpose of adding links to their Web sites, usually sites that promote Viagra or porn or some other such thing. Five or six times a day, I need to log in and delete these fake "users."