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Alrighty... you're in. You should have an email with instructions.

Application accepted. You should have an email with instructions.

Alright, I think this one's a go. Just gimme a day or two to get things set up. I just got back from the most hectic of 5 day weekends. :-P

Am I right to assume you're the same Kahvie I've been seeing on VCL and deviant art (and I believe the former Yerf)? If so, I've actually been admiring your work for years, so yeah... you get to be a shoe in. :-P

If I knew THAT, I'd be doing it already. :-P

Seriously, I don't really know. My main thought is to go back to school, and eventually become a professor of English. I may get a year down that road and find I don't like it either though.

Well, luckily(?) I don't want to work in tech. I'm primarily looking at going back to school, so the job market doesn't really worry me. The St. John's I'm talking about is St. John's newfoundland... a city on the far east coast of Canada, where Gwyn lives.

That's okay... maybe just post a few (5 or so) examples that you like best here, just to demonstrate the overall artwork. I don't need to see the entire comic.

Hey, not to shabby... looks like you gotta a decent track record of maintaining some semi-regular updates. The art has definitely improved over the course of the comic, and looks pretty good now. The site design... eh, as you said, nothing special, but it's functional, and lets us see the comic. Leaning towards a yes here.

I lived in northern colorado for several years, and drove a bus at night for one winter while I was there. I'm used to snow and ice. :-)

I'm thinking to take a road trip up to the pacific northwest soon. Check out few grad schools up in oregon and washington, maybe montana. With any luck, I'll beat the bad weather. May check out Boise and such too.

Alexa... oi! Alexa is to real statistics what KFC taste tests are to real food research. Point is, no one ever wanted a "double down" sandwhich, and the only stats Alexa gets are from the bottom 10% of internet users stupid enough to install the Alexa spyware on their computers.

Point is, don't worry too much what Alexa says about your site. But yeah, odds are that it's all spammers linking to you as a place to spam. :-)

Well, yes, there are nightly backups. Though doing it yourself is wise, especially if you don't want to wait for me to be around to fix it. The database link is on the user-services page. https://xepher.net/user-services/ It's the big link right in the center that says "Database." :-)

If you run into trouble though, let me know. I'm happy to help.

Well, for one... require approval like I do now. Meaning I have to check off on anyone. Sometimes someone "seems" legit, and still gets through though, but then they just get deleted/banned as soon as they post spam. Also, ban the countries that spam the most, like russia, china, and india. On the Admin control panel, you can go to "Ban List" and setup a hostname trigger. Add things like "*.ru", "*.in", and "*.cn" as bans. I just added .ru yesterday, and it's blocked 2600 hits already (mostly just repeats from the same few IPs, but still.)

I'm thinking about a comprehensive list of IPs from each country that I could ban at the apache level, and other people could easily use the same ban list if they wanted. I may put together something like that. For now, as mentioned above, I just added http authentication through an ugly hack. It interrupts the middle of the registration with a login prompt from the browser. I haven't gotten any new member signups since, so I'm curious to see if it works long term. If it does, I'll show others how to do it.

I've tried a new trick... I've added some HTTP authentication to the new registration process. Basically, you have to put in a second username/password, but done at the HTTP level. It should be easy for humans, but the 401 response should help throw off the bots. It has the side effect of giving me an easy regex I can run on the log files and see who was actually a person. I know most of you don't care, but if the signup process breaks for new users, let me know (via email.)

FYI, ANY real registrations that want quicker approval, feel free to email me as soon as you sign up on the forum.

My apologies for not getting to this (or other applications) yet. I'm gonna try and catch up on this now that my job is over.