icaBlog

It’s happened again – I’ve been banned from WOS. It’s now becoming a regular occurance because I’ve started to use Website Watcher almost daily. For those who don’t know, this program downloads websites and highlights changes, saving people like me a lot of time. I only check a couple of the WOS pages (“what’s new”, “utilities”, etc), but I also check the entire SinclairFAQ. I feel that this is justified as it’s a FAQ, so we “the people” like to know exactly what has changed at any time. A simple “ping” shows that these are on the same server, so checking every page of the FAQ in a short amount of time results in a ban on both that and WOS. Including the forums (tho’ oddly I can see which threads are updated, I just can’t read them – which screws up my whole view of the forums – I lose track of which threads are updated).

While I understand that mirroring of an archive like WOS is annoying, and measures are rightly put in to prevent it… it’s frankly “a tad annoying” that just checking what pages are updated on a FAQ results in me being banned from the entire “network” of sites. I realise that the way WSW works can look like mirroring, and I’m going to try altering some settings to alleviate the problem… but it’s difficult to find out the best way to do this. Especially when you’re “425 – Mirroring Denied” from the one place that may contain the information I need to get around it. And if we assume that “mirroring” is based on an IP address then we can only hope that allowances are made for the fact that other sites are hosted than just “WOS”.

I’m sure Martijn and I can come to some agreement about how it is best to check updates to the site. After all, we are both working to the same end result (promotion of the ZX Spectrum, I guess). But until I can get onto the server… well, I’ll just have to wait.