Site Policies

Server Abuse

If we catch you trying to do anything stupid to our server, your subnet will be blacklisted. "Stupid" includes any attempt to put SQL where it doesn't belong, any attempt to break into our admin pages, or anything else that causes our hosting provider to whip out their Terms of Service.

We take the triple-barrel shotgun approach to bots, spammers and other scum. If this catches a few legitimate users, well, it's up to you folks who are affected to vote with your dollars and switch to an ISP that isn't crawling with cyber criminals.

Copyright

Unless noted otherwise, all content on this site is the copyrighted property of Matthew B. Marsh. Fair use (quotations, etc.) is perfectly acceptable as long as proper attribution and a link to the original source are provided. If you would like to quote more than a few paragraphs, or if you would like to use images from this site, please contact me for permission before doing so.

Please don't hotlink my images and other media files via your own site. This is rude and wastes bandwidth- it's better to just ask for my permission. For non-commercial use, I may (depending on what you're doing) release an article or image under a Creative Commons licence for you to place on your own server. Obviously, if you want to play troll and steal stuff anyway, I can't stop you- but this is the 21st century, and we're all beyond that sort of pettiness now.

If you want to use any of my work for commercial purposes, you must contact me in advance to arrange licensing and payment terms. All of my work is subject to copyright, and may not be used commercially by other parties without a paid, signed licence agreement.

The Drupal and MySQL code that runs this site is subject to the GNU General Public Licence, and can be freely obtained from the appropriate developer sites.

Comments

Constructive, on-topic comments from human readers will be posted intact, without editorial intervention. If you include your own domain name in the comment form, your name will link back to your own site.

Exceptions to this policy will be made for the following cases:

  • Excessive profanity and trolling will be deleted. (It's my site, I make the rules.)
  • If you attempt to embed anything (iframes, hidden links, flash, images, scripts, etc) in the comment text, it will be stripped from the comment.
  • Hyperlinks that are malicious, suspicious or irrelevant will be stripped from the comment. (This includes all advertising/affiliate links unless they're an integral, relevant part of the discussion at hand.

Comments will never be censored or deleted because of disagreements or differences in opinion.

If you are a spambot, or a human serving as a spambot, your comments will be deleted and reported to the Mollom anti-spam service.

Privacy Policy

If you are browsing normally, the Web server that runs this site will know your IP address and your browser and platform versions. This information is logged, but not acted upon except for troubleshooting purposes. The same goes for RSS subscriptions: viewing the feed doesn't tell us anything about you, just an entry in the log that, for example, a Mozilla-based browser at some IP address (that the government or your ISP could probably trace to you, but that we can't) requested page X.

This site does not use third-party tracking codes, such as Facebook Like or Google Analytics, and we do not share our server logs.

If this still makes you uncomfortable (and virtually all websites collect at least this much data), then by all means feel free to use Tor or a proxy server. If you're the paranoid type, you can browse this site with cookies and JavaScript disabled, and almost all of it will still work just fine. I promise I won't make the site dependent on lousy Flash, ActiveX or other plug-in code, although I may on occasion embed content such as videos that won't display without some form of plugin (at least until HTML5 is done). We do link some JavaScript libraries via a 3rd-party CDN, as is common practice these days, so please don't blame me for problems on the CDN.

If you post anonymous comments, they will be scanned by the Mollom anti-spam engine. The Mollom privacy policy link is displayed below each comment box to which it applies. Anonymous comments are moderated (I'll remove any irrelevant links- good, on-topic links are OK though, as are URLs to your own site), and we do have the ability to correlate comment spam with IP addresses (and block said IP addresses) if this function is abused.

If you create a login for this site, or use your OpenID login, you can bypass the comment moderation queue, and you can also post a little profile with links to your own site or other identifying information. Anything you include might be seen by other visitors to the site, with one exception: your email address will remain confidential unless you explicitly indicate otherwise (eg. by including it in body text fields). The email address you provide is only used for password resets and such, or for me to personally contact you if there's a need to do so.

The server may ask to set a cookie to keep track of session ID and login information. If your browser is configured properly, this cookie (and all others) should self-destruct when you close the browser. If you are an anonymous user and refuse to allow the cookie, most of the site should still work just fine.

Visitors can't create their own permanent accounts anymore, because spammers have been abusing this functionality and wasting my time. If you're a regular commenter, I'll create the account myself so that you can bypass the spam traps.

Disclaimer

Nothing on this site constitutes legal or engineering advice, and I am not responsible for the consequences of anything you may or may not do as a result of reading material on this site. I'll post what I think is interesting, and you'll make your decisions based on what you (and you alone) think is right.