Sorry for some strange problems on this blog this evening. The blog is not appearing correctly, at least intermittently, and commenting is failing on at least some posts. It looks like a problem in WordPress or at my ISP. No time to investigate further now, so I will have to leave it now until the morning.
Gentle Wisdom
Thoughts on life from Peter Kirk
I wondered what was happening … thought maybe it was my connection being iffy … looks like you’re sorted now though 🙂
I thought I was sorted out, then it started going wrong again. I think someone is caching some files wrongly.
Apologies, I referred to your post on the Titanic in my morning post and all sorts of links were coming up so I took it off. I’ll re-reference later.
No problem, Eileen, and thanks for trying to link to me. The problems with my blog and the sinking of the Titanic were disasters so different in scale to be incomparable, but maybe in both cases, in the words of your Thomas Hardy Plot Generator, “the President of the Immortals had his sport”.
Not mine, one of Tommy H’s. An example of one of his scathing comments on orthodox Christianity, in Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
Iconoclast isn’t “anonymous”. S/he is pseudonymous, which is a very different kind of thing.
Link is now reinstated and appears to be behaving.
Thank you, Eileen. Of course you would know all about being pseudonymous.
There still seem to be some problems with the site, but not as serious as yesterday. I have disabled the CAPTCHA for now as one of the issues was with that.
Hi Peter:
The problem is not fixed. I tried to leave a comment on the post in question a moment ago and was not successful. When i clicked ‘post comment’ it tried to direct me to another URL and then said that the server could not be found.
Thank you for letting me know, Tim. I will work on this again when I have some time today.
I think I have discovered and fixed the problem.
In case anyone is interested in the details: There was a rogue .htaccess file in my WordPress main directory, on the server. This was dated 27th March and most likely found its way there on that date. This included some complex conditional redirects to doctors.net.au or similar, which caused further redirects. There should not be a .htaccess file in this directory. I deleted this file and the problem seemed to go away.
For reference, this was the content of the rogue file (after a lot of blank lines presumably to hide this content):
http://www.thedoctors.net.au seems to be a legitimate site, for Australian doctors, but maybe it has been hacked so that this subpage causes redirects. Presumably the affected posts were ones which had one of the above strings, like “ask”, in their URL.
Is it wise to publicise that code? Just a thought…
Good point, Phil. The code itself is harmless – it just traps all outgoing links from certain popular sites. It is only harmful if it gets copied into anyone’s website, which can only be done by a hacker or a rogue application. The link may be harmful, so I will edit that out.