Catallaxy Files

Gay Alcorn has a piece in the Melbourne University on-line publication The Citizen:

The union has approached 20 websites it believes have shown signs they are interested in ethics, accuracy and paying contributors once they earn enough to do so. It says that so far, 12 have signed up to the union’s “Charter of Excellence and Ethics”, to be launched mid-year.

It commits publishers to abide by the union’s code of ethics to be “fair, transparent and honest to our audience” and ensure commercial considerations “do not undermine our accuracy, fairness or honesty”.

It also holds them to “treating our employees and contributors fairly and in accordance with the relevant awards and agreements’’. In return, the sites can brand themselves as upholding ethical standards and have access to training through the Walkley Foundation.

The Cat has not been approached by the union (the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance) to sign the code of conduct. Nor will we sign if approached.

Codes of conduct are usually mechanisms that insiders set up to create barriers to entry and restrict competition.

I have noticed a tendency for threads to derail whenever 1735099 turns up. Reliving the war and conscription has become very tedious. Even if you really think that the Vietnam war was a just war, and fighting communists is the Lord’s work, and abandoning the Vietnamese people to communism was a terrible thing, you don’t need to re-argue those points in every thread. Others shouldn’t have to read it, or scroll through it, or simply abandon the thread because it has become derailed.

Some of the abuse of 1735099 is over the top. Irrespective of what you think of the Vietnam war, he was enslaved by the state and is pissed off about that. Opposition to conscription is a libertarian ideal.

In addition 1735099 is a veteran (albeit unwillingly) and should be treated with some dignity and respect (albeit unwillingly).

I would be most grateful if threadsters would confine their abuse to the arguments actually presented in the posts and the subsequent threads generated by those posts.

Thank you.

Larvatus Prodeo are back.

Approximately 4 hours ago, Ozblogistan began to receive a very high level of traffic. During this period my performance tracking tools stopped working so it is difficult to tell how much traffic was received during the period.

A few minutes ago I kicked over our web server to reset all connections, which resolved this matter last time. This time too, apparently.

There are three possibilities:

1. Misconfiguration of the web server software
2. A badly behaved indexer program
3. A denial of service attack

I am confident that the server is correctly configured, but I cannot eliminate the possibility that I am misinterpreting the available performance records. That kicking the server over “fixes” the problem might suggest this possibility.

If there was a badly behaved indexing program crawling all Ozblogistan sites, it should have turned up in my Cloudflare dashboard which, so far, it has not.

The odd man out in the Ozblogistan network is Catallaxy Files. The Cat is the only site currently not “behind” Cloudflare’s protective service. If we were receiving the loving ministrations of a badly behaved indexing program, then that program was exclusively crawling the Cat.

The unhappiest possibility is that this was a denial-of-service attack; again, directed against the Cat. Sometime in the next few days I expect that Catallaxy Files will be placed behind Cloudflare along with the other Ozblogistan sites and that this will prevent any such attacks from being successful.

Well, that’s it, folks. Please resume your usual blogging and commenting.

If you see this message, you’re on the new servers at the original providers.

Moses ain’t got nothing on me.

Some of you are having problems with the sidebar getting out of sync with comments in discussion threads.

Can you comment below as to whether this is a problem for you, and tell us your ISP.

That you can see this post means you’re on the new server. Welcome.

There will be glitches — duplicates and the like.

Sorry about the disruption, but I hoped you all enjoyed the kittens and the dalek.

Last night the Ozblogistan network slowed down and then began to “yo-yo” — stop working and then reappear cyclically.

I have been becoming increasingly dissatisfied with WPEngine’s reliability and service. Tis was the straw that broke the camel’s back. So I began a crash move of the network to a new hosting service, Page.ly.

That is why the site was unavailable last night and this morning, and why you first saw kittens and then a little moving truck.

Page.ly’s service has already shown itself to be much better than WPEngine’s; however they have reported back that migration is going slowly because the WPEngine servers periodically drop the connection they’re using to download files.

Their advice was to switch back to WPEngine’s servers for today. Any posts or comments from today could then be migrated using the WXR import/export facility built into WordPress.

So here we are, temporarily back at WPEngine. Tonight I and the Page.ly staff will try the move again.

A few hours ago WPEngine finally traced the problem back the recent comments widget on Skepticlawyer and Catallaxy Files. I’ve disabled those for now. (Amazing how much their service has improved, now that I’m leaving).

Hello everyone, your friendly Ozblogistan Tyrant here.

Ozblogistan was moved to new servers on Monday night by some subcontractors. The ensuing few days have been a mess because the move was only incompletely successful. In particular, bloggers have been unable to log into the wordpress backend to write posts or moderate comments.

This morning a threw a switch and it appears as though we are slowly coming back online. I’m very sorry for the disruption.

Update Saturday 2:17PM WST: Failure. I will probably have to try again on Monday night. I’ve re-enabled comments.

Hello all, your friendly Ozblogistan Tyrant here.

This weekend I will be performing one of the biggest changes made to Ozblogistan in several years.

I am moving the site from its current home to a new one.
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