Sure, mom… lets make $20 a day babysitting the neighbor’s kid. >_< I have a pounding headache and a 4 year old who screams one in every three words she says, whines every 1 out of 2, and shrieks for anything and everything.

Right now she’s pitching a fit because I didn’t want her in my room messing with my schoolbooks. Poor Luna is threatening to bite her and Echo hasn’t come out of hiding since she showed up. But that damned dog has been a real trooper, playing with her almost nonstop since she came over. Kaze has even taken a turn. Those animals are something else, let me tell you.

But making $100 this week alone is freaking awesome. I guess all that’s left is to say that I’m gonna feel this in the morning. *le sigh*

EDIT: Now she wants a 20+ year old, ratty, stinky wrist warmer I got back when I was a kid that she found in the pile of cat toys. Is $20 really worth this?? Oh, lets not forget she wanted me to give her my safety sissors, Jasson’s psychology book (WTF?), and my colored pencils.

Well, after much hunting, I finally discovered what had happened.

Apparently, someone had hacked into Jasson’s Gutter Club and had created a hidden directory. Inside that hidden directory was the spam form.

So, I’m sorry Jass — but it had to go. The gutter directory has been completely nuked.

Frankly, I’m about ready to hand off my Flea fanlisting to someone too. I can’t afford to have some idiot hacking into my site, just for the purpose of sending spam. Since they use the same system (PHPfanbase 2.0), Flea is at risk too. Though probably not as much risk as the idea of an Adult Humor fanlisting.

What’s more, I visit the site to see if maybe there’s a patch and I discover a rather cryptic post set right around the time I had all those hacking problems declaring that there’s security issues, but they won’t go into any details.

Well, screw it. Netbunch never did get back to me, they deleted my support ticket and have basically ignored every request for help I made. I need a new host…

My host is on the fast track to being fired / reported to the BBB.

In November, I had a bunch of hackers trying to break into my copy of eFiction. I managed to get the archive updated, patched, and remodified so it works fairly decently.

Now, I have some spammer using my domain’s catch all e-mail address for his spam campaign. He’s put it as the return address for his current campaign, so all returned e-mails are going to MY account.

I found out because my e-mail was slow and I needed to send a quick note to Bender. Thinking something was up, I opened up my browser and noticed my site was acting buggy. I went to my Webmail and BOOM. 7000 returned e-mails.

Thinking it was the hackers exploiting my site again, I deleted all contact forms. Nope, didn’t touch it. Put them back up. I managed to slow it down my installing some e-mail blockers and filters on my Webmail, but I still easily end up deleting 1000 e-mails a day.

So behold - well over 10,000 returned e-mails in 48 hours. ( I lost count after 10,000) My bandwidth is being eaten alive (I’m up to a whole gig) and it’s only the 9th of December. I’ve removed all downloads and extras to help protect my bandwidth, as well as further compressing my images to make them smaller.

On the 7th, I wrote a very panicked e-mail post to the Netbunch support forums begging for help in stemming this flood. Nothing. I send in a support ticket the next morning - nothing.

I repost a less panicked version of my post and bump my old one as well as submitting a new ticket with more information. I finally get a response: I get yelled at for spamming. My first support ticket is deleted, my first post is locked, my second post is deleted. It’s been 2 days since I heard from anyone and the e-mails keep coming.

I’m going to wait until tomorrow morning before I post a followup to my support ticket and inform them that I still need help. Then, if nothing else happens I’m submitting a complaint to the BBB regarding this shit. As soon as tax returns come back, Mom and Jass are talking very seriously about moving the site to a new host.

Sure, it’s a cliche, but I have to wonder when I became flypaper for freaks.

I keep hashing over the idea of making some people Moderators over at Lunaescence.

It’s not that my archive is getting out of control — hell, it runs itself most months. I’ve somehow lucked out and gotten some of the most awesome people there.

The problem comes with the fact that we’re graduating within the next 6 to 9 months. And the internships will happen well before that.

I’m already beginning to get stories for anime and manga that I don’t know. I’ve never been able to get into Gundam Seed or Yu Yu Hakusho. FMA and Inu Yasha is awesome, but I don’t know the fandom. I don’t have time to look them up anymore either or lurk for a week or so. So I’m letting stories through that I probably shouldn’t, albeit dubiously.

But I’m not sure I want to go into Mods. I have rules for quality, not for elitism. I don’t want to see people turned completely away because they have issues with their writing; I want them to edit and try again. At the same time, I can see where someone more familair with the fandom might be a better judge of a story’s quality.

I’m running out of time, so I need to be deciding soon.

Well, as you may have gathered from Jasson’s journal everything is still more or less going okay.

I really need to find out why I’m so quick to panic. I have two weeks where I’m fine; the picture of calm. And then suddenly I find myself either panicking or pissed off for absolutely no reason whatsoever. >_> *sighs* Basically, if I write a post where I’m super panicked, please don’t take me too seriously. You’ll know if it’s serious if Jasson says something.

….

We’re almost done with fall semester and then we have a bit before Winter semester begins. I’m passing my graphics class with flying colors, though relearning HTML has been a bit of a challenge. I haven’t done any nested table layouts in years… which means I am seriously out of practice. In my final assignment for that chapter, I couldn’t figure out how to get one of the inner tables to align properly. I’ve never been particularly skilled at forms either, so that gave me trouble too. The most forgiving chapter yet has been frames (wow!) and CSS (duh.) XD

However, my absolute lowest moment came when I had to make a CSS map. It was supposed to have little boxes that would appear on top of the map when you moused over the corresponding landmark. I would get one part working and then everything I’d done before would die on me. I finally got it working in MSIE, but the damn thing wouldn’t work in Firefox. Only after I turned it in did I find out I was one character away from making them work.

I wrote:

#point01
{ CSS goes here }

but I had to write:

#point01 A
{ Same CSS goes here}

I forgot to put that “A” at the end of the CSS declaration, which tells browsers that the spot is also a link. >_< Since Firefox is a bit more strict than MSIE, it didn't understand what I was doing.

Other than that, school is going pretty well. I’ll be glad when this semester is over, but I’m not looking forward to next semester either. I’m going to have about $400 - $500 worth of books I’ll need to purchase for just four classes.

I swear these publishers must be bandits. That much money for books is simply outrageous. Though I suppose I should be happy; since once I walked out of the bookstore at CMU once with $800 worth of books and supplies. All the same, I’d really prefer not to have to pay that much or tack that much onto my student loans.

I also recently discovered that I’m probably going to need to either buy more space for Lunaescence or simply buy another space for my graphics. I released two skins for the eFiction script last month and the downloads are simply killing my bandwidth. It took me a bit to figure it out, since I kept having hack attempts all last month. (More on that below.) Now that the chaos has calmed down, I can clearly see the suckage is coming from those two files. >_>

It seems strange (and almost flattering) to see hits coming from Web sites in Germany, France, Italy and know they’re using my eFiction skins. Seems even stranger when I look at my inbox and see all the requests for custom layouts and advice on how we did some things.

Part of me really is amazed by the reaction, but the other part of me keeps thinking “What in the world have I gotten myself into?”

Anyway, yeah… hack attempt. Last month, a guy in Italy released a full disclosure of eFiction’s security vulnerabilities and how to exploit them. I mean right down to the scripting they should use. Fake gif images, SQL injections, and remote scripting — oh my. So I had several hundred attempts to find “suntzu.php” in my non-existent author image folders, plus attempts to create directories, strange e-mails apparently generated by my script, and more. Lets just say the archive only looks the same. On top of the security patches Tammy released, I damn near changed the archive’s entire file structure.

All while trying to get all this homework done. XD I’ll say one thing, if those people did any service it was teaching me how to multi-task better. Though I just wish I could whittle down the modification requests, layout requests, and question e-mails so I could do a new layout for my blog and get the Christmas layout done for the main site.

Description: This allows for separate display of author penname, contact link, and the add author to favorites link in user.tpl.

This is just an itty bitty mod I cooked up for my own site. I figured I might as well slap it up here.

As usual, back up your files before you attempt this. You know the drill. ^_^

Requirements: eFiction 2.0

Difficulty: Easy

Modification History:
- 30 November, 2005 — Mod released

Files Involved:

• viewuser.php
• skins/YOURSKIN/user.tpl

Modification & Support: eFiction.org

Instructions: