The local scout groups gathered together today with the high school band, couple of VFW posts and lots of neighbors gathered today at the local cemetery to honor our armed forces.
As you go about your holiday activities, remember that we live as free as we do only because of the men and women who put their skills and their lives between us and our enemies.
Chris
I don’t think I can ever say this enough. People claiming to be traveling outside the country is a red flag indicating a scammer.
Really? These “people” are on an extended vacation and have nothing better to do than sell your car?
Lately the scammers are using an email format of a name, two digits, and @msn.com. That doesn’t mean that someone using a different style email address is safe, and probably after they read this they’ll switch email formats. But if you’ve received email lately from a format like this, and it smells fishy, toss their emails in the trash.
Thanks,
Chris
Just a friendly reminder, the ‘Now Hiring’ category is just that, a category for employers with job openings. I find it fascinating that the local paper advertised X number of jobs in every issue, nearly all of which are actually headhunter ads culled from monster.com. Pennswoods.net consistently has more job openings listed, and they are _real_ jobs.
The many varieties of pay-us-to-start-a-work-from-home-job are not welcome in the ‘Now Hiring’ section. The few that survive people reporting them as inappropriate I will remove myself.
Chris
Thanks to upgrades in the capacity of the classifieds, I’m pleased to be able to offer the repost feature on ads up to 2 months old. This has been a popular request, and I am thrilled to be able to offer it, effective immediately.
Chris
I’m in Harrisburg this evening, and will be until about mid-day tomorrow. If anyone is interested in meeting up, drop me an email at classifieds@pennswoods.net.
Chris
So the site seems to be functioning up to speed again, and I’m just about caught up with responding to emails.
A couple of things cross my mind right now. One, please be civil. I don’t want to be anyone’s baby sitter.
The second thing is that email addresses are not permitted in the ads. Email addresses in ads attract the scammers and spammers, and they are hard enough to fend off as it stands. I also get the occasional person who thinks I sell their email address. I never have, and never will. But then someone posts their email address in an ad, gets a ton of spam, and thinks I sold the address.
Phone numbers, while I discourage it, are permitted in ads. I get a little chuckle out of things like this:
Thanks for looking, and if you feel like calling me with questions, please feel free to do so @ Five-7-Zero/3-six-7/8-zero-6-zero
I suspect that fails to achieve the purpose of getting the contact information out there, and if some crank calls you because you published your phone number, that’s a matter for the police to deal with, not me.
Best wishes to all of you,
Chris
Tonight’s maintenance has gone well. The database feeding the classifieds sign on is healthy once again. I’ve not completed testing password changes, etc, but I expect that by later this morning things will be close to normal again.
Chris
As of right now, I apparently am still unable to activate new signups, and password changes and email address changes are frequently failing.
Later this evening I intend to take the databases down in order to repair them, and I hope that by tomorrow morning I’ve hammered out the last of the bugs from last week’s hardware failures.
Chris
This week has seen a couple of headaches. On Wednesday morning I found and fixed an issue that was delaying approval of new accounts. Then later on Wednesday one of my web servers flaked out, resulting in some 30% or so of visitors between 9:30am and 1pm unable to access the site.
Thanks to those of you sending me error messages, and a special thanks to Vaughn, Atlantic Broadband engineer and Pennswoods web monkey for his rapid response to correct the problem for us!
About three weeks ago I introduced a change that was intended to fix shortened subjects when someone used the single quote (or apostrophe) in placing an ad. In theory the change was simple, just make a call to an html entity encoder for “unsafe” characters, such as single quote, double quote, etc.
Unfortunately it also encoded the ampersand, ‘&’. Since this check would be made when an ad was submitted as well as when it was edited, an ad for a S&W pistol might be properly encoded the first time. It would display as “S&W pistol”. But behind the scenes is actually looked like “S&W pistol”. Then when the ad was edited the ampersand would be encoded again, resulting in this behind the scenes: “S&W pistol”. And that would display as “S&W pistol”.
Several people pointed it out to me, thanks guys! I found a way to fix that this afternoon, and while there are still ads out there that say &, the problem should fade away as those ads are edited or expire.
Thanks!
Chris