As part of last night’s Blogware maintenance, CAPTCHAs were added to the comment form. CAPTCHAs are images like the one below which contains text the commenter will need to enter into the field after the image to verify that a human is filling out the form.

Using CAPTCHAs will help prevent blog comment spam (which also helps the Blogware system run better). Currently, this feature is enabled for all blogs, applies to anonymous and logged in commenters, and cannot be disabled. In the future, this will be an option you can enable/disable in your blog’s settings.

Last night and into this morning, Blogware was hit by an broad and aggressive comment spam run. This affected many blogs with anonymous commenting enabled. Blogware is working on deleting the comment spam at this time.

You should evaluate your need for anonymous comments and disable them if possible to prevent anonymous comment spam.

Adaptive Hosting Solutions uses email to communicate with our customers for nearly every aspect of our business from support requests to domain renewal reminders. Over time, we have settled on our current communication guidelines for email.

Below are the guidelines we use when communicating by email. These can be useful to determine if an email is a valid email from us or to configure your email filters to prevent messages from us from being delayed or dropped.

• All email will be sent from an account in the adaptivehostingsolutions.com domain
• All email will be plain text and not contain any attachments
• All support requests submitted through our support system will be responded to from  support@adaptivehostingsolutions.com
• All domain renewal reminders, SSL certificate reminders, Email Defense information, and Blogware trial expiration reminders will be sent from support@adaptivehostingsolutions.com and contain the following in the subject: [Adaptive Hosting Solutions]
• All billing notices will be sent from billing@adaptivehostingsolutions.com and contain the following in the subject: [Adaptive Hosting Solutions]
• All general notices will be sent from info@adaptivehostingsolutions.com and contain the following in the subject: [Adaptive Hosting Solutions]
• We never send email from an account at your domain—only viruses and spam do this

If you receive an email that purports to be from us and doesn’t meet the guidelines above, please send the message with full headers to support@adaptivehostingsolutions.com

Blogware—the software that powers this blog—is a fully functional blogging service which includes the Publisher’s Control Panel where you can manage your blog and posts. In addition to this, you can also use 3rd party blogging software like BlogJet, Ecto, and others to post articles to your blog.

While this flexibility is good, it often causes confusion as to what you can/must do with the Publisher’s Control Panel and what you can do with 3rd party blogging software. To try to clear this up, I whipped up a quick chart which notes most of the common tasks you do with your Blogware blog and what you can do with each tool.

Action/Tool	Publisher's Control Panel	3rd Party Posting Software
Posting an article	Yes	Yes
Editing an article	Yes	Yes†
Creating a photo album	Yes	No
Uploading a photo to an album	Yes	No
Creating a category	Yes	No
Managing users and permissions	Yes	No
Viewing stats	Yes	No

† - Supported by most posting software

Blogware has scheduled a maintenance window on September 17, 2005 to continue optimization work on the Blogware databases. The blogs and the management interfaces will be offline during the maintenance.

Date:  9/17/2005
Start Time:  11:00 PM EDT
Duration: 4 Hours

Impact: During both of these windows, the Publishers' Control Panel and blogs will not be accessible. Each interface will be made live as soon as it is available to minimize impact.

Adaptive Hosting Solutions and our parent company, Red Rocket, are working with the Orlando Advertising Federation to offer free blog hosting for AAF members affected by Katrina.

The main blog coordinating this effort is the AAF - Unified Voices For Hurricane Relief blog. Please see their blog for more information.

Blogware has generously agreed to allow extensions of these free trials after the standard 30 day period if needed.