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Website Technical FAQ

This page is for technical questions about this website.

If you have any questions about this website not answered below, please contact me on info@bfcsa.co.uk

Hotlinking Images

For years I haven't stressed too much about hotlinking images. Various websites did it, including messageboard users inserting them on posts, but it didn't really make a dent on the amount downloaded.

However, a website recently hotlinked to an image and over the course of about six weeks this used up more than a third of the data downloaded! So reluctantly I have blocked images from being hotlinked. If you want to use an image on your own website just save it to your own site! I can't stop you can I? (Although an acknowledgement would be appreciated :-)

If you have a site and want to hotlink images from this site for some reason, feel free to email me (address above) with the reasons, and a promise that you're not the BBC ;-) and I'll see what I can do.

Apologies to messageboard users who will no longer be able to insert images into posts. I used to enjoy following the links from the logs when I noticed it had happened, and see what was being discussed on random boards.

Yahoo!

I have prevented Yahoo! from indexing this site as it was attempting to index it 100s of times per week - downloading five times as much as Google in one week.

Please note that the Yahoo! search engine may no longer be up to date for searching this site. This doesn't affect any other search engines.

This has nothing to do with how many times it is used to find the site by visitors. On the contrary, in one week Google UK* was used 250 times compared to Yahoo!'s 15.

* This doesn't include Google from other countries.

Fasterfox

The Fasterfox extension for Firefox prefetches pages by downloading all the links on any given page. This has the advantage that if you click on a link it has already been downloaded in the background and the page will appear straightaway. But it has the big disadvantage to the BFCSA in that we have to pay for all the bandwidth this uses up. Especially when you take into account the fact that hardly anyone will visit more than a few pages in any one visit.

However, Fasterfox honours the robots.txt file, so I'll let it off ;-) This site prevents Fasterfox prefetching as described on the Fasterfox FAQ.

Blocked IP Addresses

The following IP addresses have been blocked from accessing this site as I have deemed them to be robots not adhering to the rules (RIP Asimov ;-) outlined here: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html

If blocking these IP addresses is causing you a problem please contact me on info@bfcsa.co.uk.

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