Views from Medina Road

The online ballot for the Locus Poll and Survey is ready and was posted briefly last night before I realized that none of the test submissions I sent were appearing in my inbox. So I removed the homepage link and went investigating at my hosting service (that's CI Host), and quickly found this notice:

We regret to inform our Customers that the dp_tellafriend, cgiemail, insecure formmail, totmail, and alienform scripts have been disabled on all servers due to continual abuse.

Naturally, they had not notified their Customers of this, beyond posting the notice on their own website.

The key to part of the solution is 'insecure'. So the link to the poll form has to go through the secure server (i.e., https:// [etc]). Did that, submitted more tests, still didn't work. Further investigation uncovered revisions to the formmail cgi script, requiring the recipient email address in the form to explicitly match the email, or at least the format of the email, specified in the cgi script. All of these changes are spam-preventative measures, supposedly. Anyway, I made further changes, and am awaiting confirmation from Locus HQ that the latest test submissions got to where they're supposed to go. When everything looks OK, the ballot form will be back online.

I'm 90% over the flu, though it apparently has a long trailing edge.