Development of Clever Copy version 4.0 is now underway. Combined with this, however, is an impending house move so it might take longer than I would like to get a public release version ready for download. Plenty of new features will be available in V4 but, as usual, I like to keep the details close to my chest until I have a working prototype.

Currently I am laying down the specification for this next version and I expect coding to begin in a few months time. Since I no longer work full time on this, these things always take longer than I would like. Having said that then, expect a launch date sometime this year!

 For a short while I will have to take a short sabbatical from this site (in fact, all my sites - I run around 20 websites altogether). I hope it won't be for too long, a few months perhaps, but it is to do with the recent changes in my lifestyle.

I'm sorry to say that it's unavoidable but it does mean that things like forum posts will not be answered any time soon unless someone else cares to provide an answer for you. The alternative to this is to mothball this site for the foreseeable future and that's really not something I want to do since the interest levels are still fairly high.

I am hoping that, on my return, I will be refreshed, renewed and good to go again with an updated version of Clever Copy - Clever Copy V4.0!!

 I've been considering the future direction of Clever Copy and how it now fits into my current lifestyle. Make no mistake, developing Clever Copy has been a very time consuming business and each major revision update is taking progessively longer to devise, write, debug, release and support. Essentially it has reached the stage where an enforced change in my recent circumstances means that I have to look at how, or even if, I will continue to develop it.

My current thinking is that Clever Copy has been generally so well received by users that it would be a shame to now just abandon it and cease development and yet I really don't have the time or the resources any more to do that. This means that I have to look at other ways of making sure that it can be fully developed and that means opening the source code up and removing any license restrictions in place.

By doing this, other people can then develop Clever Copy by writing their own updates and improvements and the best way to do this is by releasing Clever Copy under the GNU/GPL licensing scheme. I shall be considering my options over the next few weeks and will post again when I have made a final decision.

 So I saw this on another site somewhere and, because it made me laugh, I thought I would share it with you..


Passengers on a small commuter plane are waiting for the flight to leave. The rear entrance door opens, and two men walk up the aisle, dressed in pilots' uniforms both are wearing dark glasses, one is using a seeing-eye dog, and the other is tapping his way up the aisle with a cane.

Nervous laughter spreads through the cabin; but the men enter the cockpit, the door closes, and the engines start up. The passengers begin glancing nervously around, searching for some sign that this just a little practical joke. None is forthcoming. The plane moves faster and faster down the runway, and people at the windows realize that they're headed straight for the water at the edge of the airport territory.

As it begins to look as though the plane will never take off, that it will plough into the water, panicked screams fill the cabin--but at that moment, the plane lifts smoothly into the air.

The passengers relax and laugh a little sheepishly, and soon they have all retreated into their magazines, secure in the knowledge that the plane is in good hands.

Up in the cockpit, the co-pilot turns to the pilot and says:
"You know, Bob, one of these days, they're going to scream too late, and we're all gonna die..."

 The rules have changed, spam bots are back and they’re bad! This is an experiment into how email address harvesters or spam bots work, why they are sometimes responsible for your emails not arriving, why the commonly used ways of fooling them don’t work anymore, what the hell is tar pitting anyway and how to really protect yourself 100% from the dreaded spam bots. I also test drive some of the latest bots – you’ll be horrified by the results! Warning – this is a long article for me so be prepared to spend some time reading!

Lately I have been conducting an interesting little experiment. I set up a dummy website that contained twenty pages that did nothing at all. In fact, the only text on that site was a dead email address on each page along with a few lines of nonsense that should hold the readers attention for just a few seconds. I advertised this site in a number of places, but mainly on forums and message boards and waited for the hits to arrive. I did not make any direct announcement about this site, I simply included it as a part of my forum signature so that people could see and click it if they were of a mind to do that since what I was really looking for was the automated spam bot rather than the human visitor.

Now you may wonder what the point of this is. It is simple, I wanted to test how long it would be before email address harvesters found the site and began to trawl it looking to extract email addresses, what they did when they were there and how they operated. I needn’t have worried, by day three it had been visited twice by harvesters. How do I know they were harvesters? I don’t but it’s a fair guess since each page was visited in turn and in the correct order (the site menu had instructions for people who can read but the instructions would not be followed by harvesters since they can’t read. In addition there were some hidden links that a person shouldn’t find but a robot would) and the time spent on each page was as low as could be measured. These things together all pointed towards a non human visit but neither were these visitors search engine robots because the SE’s usually announce their presence one way or another and their behaviour on a site is a giveaway along with the IP addresses they arrive from. So, what we had then was likely to be an email extractor, harvester or spam bot and it was there sucking up any email addresses it could find – lucky then that I was feeding it crap!

Anyway, why should you be worried about what an email address harvester is doing on your site? Well, put simply, if you don’t care that’s fine but there will come a time when any email addresses on your site become so clogged up with crap that they are no longer usable and you’ll have to get yourself another one. No biggie, there are plenty of places to get a free address these days and most of them can even be fed directly into your PC’s email client so you don’t even have to visit the free hosts website any more to read your mail. But what if I told you that someone was getting rich off the back of your email address that you don’t care about and that it was having a negative effect on your site?.......

[More...]

 The winter drought will be over on Sunday with the start of the new F1 season - hurrah!

To give it a proper welcome, I've decided to code a new site that I've been threatening to do for the last few years. Just something quick and simple but a lot of fun. Fantasy F1 a la Magus Perde is here! This year I was going to join a fantasy F1 site and take part in the action but, to be honest, I couldn't find a site that had what I wanted.

I wanted to be able to change the cars as the season progressed but no site seems to allow you to do that. Well it does now 'cos I wrote my site so you could do exactly that and make your cars go faster as the season moves on! Anyway, find out all about it by clicking FANTASY F1

ENJOY!

 A problem has been identified whereby a spammer can hijack some of the contact forms used on Clever Copy. The spammer can then use your server and, pretending to be you, send 1,000's of emails. The files in question are contactsend.php, mailarticle.php and mailposter.php. You are strongly advised to delete these files from your server now.

The obvious possible effects are that your ISP bans you, your host bans you and everyone else thinks you're a spamming loser! This problem was reported yesterday and I'm, pleased to say that a fix is already available in the downloads section. This is a critical update. If you want to keep your server secure, go and download the fix. Instructions are contained in the download. My thanks to those who reported the problem to me.

 For all the Swedish users of Clever Copy V3.0, you now no longer have to change all the language labels yourself!

Bjorn Hammarback has done all the hard work for you and the Swedish language files are now available in the downloads section of the site. I would like to express my sincere thanks to Bjorn, I wrote the original language files so I know just how much hard work and time has gone into this - thanks Bjorn! Bjorns' contact details can be found in the language files themselves.

Also in the pipeline are language files for French, German, Dutch and even Occidental. More about those anon.