Some things don’t always work properly …
… Unfortunately, that applies to us!
There are a couple of issues we need to explain, and to apologise for:
1 Daily, we are receiving notifications that people are being blocked from the site. Most likely these people have tried to login to make a comment (and we unblock them immediately).
Please note that to comment on this site you do not need to log in. True, we announced earlier in the year that you could log in once – and stay logged in for 12 months – but that system encountered unseen errors, and at the time we apologised for this mess-up. We apologise again if this applies to you, and for any angst it might have caused.
If you have been blocked, please be assured that you can still comment on the site.
Login is only available to admin and authors.
Others may be attempting to log in to click “Like this” under an article. This feature is not operated by us – it is a WordPress feature and to “Like” the article, WordPress first require you to log in to your WordPress account. This feature is thus only available to those users who have a WordPress account. The workings of this feature are beyond The AIMN’s control.
2 We receive literally dozens of emails a day through our “Contact The AIMN” facility, and we are delighted to be able to engage with you.
Many of you might still be waiting for our reply, and we apologise if you are one of those people. We have replied, but we have been receiving heaps of “Delivery Status Notification (Failure)” emails back in response.
In the email is the message:
Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block list.
That required some investigation …
Our internet provider – Internode – has been blocked by gmail and Yahoo mail as someone with an Internet address has been spamming, and in response all emails sent to a gmail or Yahoo address have been blocked.
Internode are working on this but there is no telling how long before we are up and running.
Regardless, in the meantime we still can’t contact you if you have a gmail or Yahoo address.
Hopefully, this short post has explained why.
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33 comments
Login here Register hereOh, and here’s me thinking that Benito Duddo and the ever present ASIO were monitoring and censoring my submissions that supported the lack of policies from this Scummo Lazy Nasty People misgovernment which worked for the benefit of Australian voters.
No Michael, I will not shut up about the inadequate improper and amoral behaviour of Barnyard Joke, the Adulterer-in-Chief and representative of the nat$ in New England because Tamworth women supporting adultery support national$ and we Australian voters deserve better candidates.
OK, OK … so you claim that editors have rights too …… mutter, grumble ….. Just keep the true situation in Australia before the readership and maybe, just maybe, our grandkids will have an Australian future.
Nah, NEC, we just ignore you anyway. 😜😜😜
I’m joking, of course.
I was a bit paranoid also, New England Cocky but the one good thing about p.duddies police state is that one day they can’t ring the thumb screws and then they have forgotten to charge up the cattle prods. Messing with the internet rather like taking a census is totally beyond them. Skidmark may choose to close the whole thing down on religious grounds but by then we will be back to semaphore and smoke signals.
Scott Morrison@Psychos4Christ.com
Michael
I find that I have to login on a random basis but it’s no real problem.
But while we’re on the subject, I haven’t been able to receive Notify me of follow-up comments by email for ages. Does this actually work ?
Terence, all authors or admin have to login before they can comment, so they’re the exception to the rule. It’s not a rule that we made, as it was set by the security software we use. Hackers do try to login as one of our authors so this requirement sorts out who’s genuine and who is not.
As for not receiving the emails, I’ll have a look at how I can get it fixed. It’s a feature run by WordPress so I’ll have to follow it up with them. Wish me luck.
Well Michael – the ‘test’ did not work …. came up as ‘page not found’ but gave the usual list of recent published articles, so figured this was the best one to tell you about that.
Sorry to hear you are having so much trouble – you haven’t been hacked in a more sophisticated way have you ? Guess that would be one of the first things you’d look at.
Hopefully AIMN is up and running well again very soon – I read most all of the articles every day, and only occasionally comment these days, but wouldn’t miss them for quids.
Such a great site.
Cheers –
What test is that, Anne?
Hi Michael, just a note to say that I’m using gmail and having no problems at all (famous last words..) in accessing the site or receiving communications, notifications or follow up comments. That suggests to me, though I’m very far from any real expertise in the area, that if some are having problems it is probably an issue with their ISP.
Please excuse me if I’m stating the obvious or if you or someone has made this point already and I’ve missed it.
Anne, I was notified of your test, so your attempts are going somewhere but I don’t know what that means or if it is relevant. 🙂
A controversial post, even by AIM standards.
Good to see nonsibi back.
nonsibicunctis, emails regarding new posts are sent by WordPress, so they’re fine. It’s only emails we send from our own email address that are being rejected by gmail. Which explains why I couldn’t respond to your email yesterday. I’ll take this opportunity to thank you for your kind words and for the use of your comment as a post.
Lambchop, what, pray tell, is controversial about this post?
Humph!!! Michael. If it wasn’t for Kaye Lee’s thoeoughy research thoughtful articles I would take my quill and scribble elsewhere ….. oh, and the ‘test’ did not work …. came up as ‘page not found’ but gave the usual list of recent published articles, so figured this was the best one to tell you about that.
What test, NEC? What page wasn’t found?
I had to change the pic. It had a spelling mistake in it.
But it wasn’t my fault. 😁
Michael I too got a message purportedly from AIMN headed ‘test’ and when I opened it it came up with the message others have mentioned ‘page not found’.
More to the point what’s NOT controversial about this post…
On substance, that story about internode was intriguing.
Romeo, is that message about new posts?
Lambchop, Internode consistently wins the most reliable internet in Australia award most years.
Romeo, next time you get an email from us titled “test” could you kindly forward it to us at theaimn@internode.on.net? It wasn’t sent by us, so I’d welcome the opportunity to look into it.
Problem solved.
One of our admin informs me that the “test” emails are being sent out by our web developer. (They often do little maintenance runs).
Nice to have a brain, isn’t it Michael?
I never doubted it for a minute. 👍
Others often seem to feel that I’ve said the wrong thing or am off in bozo land or something so excuse me if this comment is just another indication of my ignorance.
It just seems to me that Michael’s initial post has been met with an unmerited and, to me, unfriendly comment. I don’t understand why, unless it is all just not very bright repartee and I’m too staid to comprehend or appreciate it.
I come here because it is one of the few places where I often find insightful and pertinent opinion, observations and comment regarding the parlous state of our national government, many of its institutions, and not an inconsiderable weight of insipid and ill-informed, self-entered populism.
Internet technology and indeed modern information technology and equipment is fraught with problems and rife with what often seem incomprehensible errors. Certainly these create frustration, not least to myself because my mental state causes me to be easily frustrated.
What bothers me more, however, (and tell me that I’m an idiot if you will) is that some here choose to lay this at Michael’s feet as though he was an IT specialist responsible for all technicalities as opposed to an instigator,, coordinator, mediator and sometimes, necessarily, an editor.
Thankfully the cause of the disruption appears to have been found and hopefully we can return to the discussion, comment and observation for which the site was created.
If, to you, my. remarks sound pompous – and I suspect that they will to some – please accept that such is not the position from which I make them. I know only too well how little I know and how little my opinion counts but I feel the need to offer it anyway. That’s all.
Michael – I have already forwarded the ‘Test’ post which I did not try to open in case it was spam.
Nonsibi and new tech… with TV shows like the Drum it is some times frustrating, the breakdown of comments feeds during the show, it is easy to forget interactive TV wasn’t even thought of till recently.
Don’t worry Michael. You are a fine bloke and I;ve only admiration for what you and the AIM crew achieve daily.
Aw shucks nonsibi …..don’t take it too seriously. I was also fooled by Michael’s expertise with computers and believed that he had taken early retirement from Microsoft to pursue other personal interests. (Michael, how do you do that emoji thingy on AIMN? Copy in?)
You have to at least try to keep Michael in line otherwise he might become the strictest editor since Frank Packer at the Sydney Daily Telegraph.
We all here at AIMN recognise as you do that our words are falling on deaf ears but we continue to scream in protest because that is the only way enough noise might, just might, overcome the verbiage and hate speech that abounds in our MSM masquerading as “news”.
NEC, thanks – I’ll do my best to lighten up. I am a very mixed up bloke, passionate about equity & responsible freedom, welcoming difference as opportunity rather than deficit, and using the 10% of our potential brain power that is evidently the norm, to as close to 100% capacity as we can.
I am seriously disturbed at the increasing statements that, to paraphrase, ‘globalisation is ending’ as though this were a good thing, not because I particularly welcomed much of what globalisation meant in terms of profiteering & exploitation of the majority world but because what appears to be being welcomed in its place is a return to insularity and the curse of ideological nationalism.
I grew up in the immediate aftermath of WWII, in England, and played among broken buildings looking very much like the side elevation drawings in illustrations showing the internal structure and fittings of objects that are used in workshop manuals, explanatory books for children, and so on. Often it was as though the building had been sliced in half along its vertical and furniture and household items, in dishevelled, dusty and relatively intact other than for sometimes being a skewed position, would be on show for all to see. What was missing was the people who had lived in these buildings.
Then there were the compounds of collapsed, distorted and mangled military and other vehicles, presumably awaiting their demise at the scrap merchants, and the anti-aircraft gun emplacements, intact save for the guns having being removed.
With the innocence and lack of sophisticated understanding that children have, alongside their ability to turn almost anything into play, these wrecks and remnants of the recent conflagration were our playgrounds. Sadly, because human beings seem to use very little of even that 10% of brain power to which they do have access, and so make for poor parenting and modelling to new generations, many of our games were our imaginative reconstruction of warfare, killing, hating and destruction.
We would climb into the less damaged of military lorries and such and pretend to be part of an attack force or commando unit working behind enemy lines to destroy a bridge or an airfield or whatever. We never questioned why we were doing that – we had already learned to hate Germans as though each and every man, woman and child of that nation was a replica of Hitler. We learned self righteousness and that war was ‘necessary’ and ‘God was on our side’. This notion constituted one of me earliest recognitions of mass irrationality as I grew and realised that it seemed virtually every nation had ‘God on its side.’ Bob Dylan says it far better than can I in his song: ‘God on our side’.
And sadly, even after we were able to shop without ration coupons and the debris of bombing was removed and new buildings stood in our erstwhile playgrounds, the social conditioning of discrimination continued through the use of terms such as ‘Jerry built’, ‘filthy Arabs’, ‘krauts’. This was accompanied by the re-writing of history that seems to be mandatory for victors. Not least in this regard was the focus on the mass persecution & murder of Jews [6 million] but virtual silence (that continues to the present day) regarding the losses of Russians [24,000,000] and Chinese [20,000,000] who died in much greater numbers. Nor was particular note made of the fact that for every military person killed, three civilians died.
Our anti-social, anti-social indoctrination continued through the glut of ‘Cowboys and Indians’ films, the glorification of our ‘heroes’s, the onset of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear destruction and rampant poverty. Much has happened in the World since those days of my youth, some of it good but much of it simply more hateful and irrational action, discrimination, incarceration, torture, repression and killing.
I won’t go on for I’m sure you get the picture and most of you, if not all, knew it already. So, today I find it very difficult to climb out of despair that 100 hundred years since the end of the ‘War to end all wars’ and 75 years since the end of WWII I find myself in a world whose ‘leaders’ seem to have learned little to nothing. Spending on military hardware, conflict and violence and stubborn refusal to negotiate or compromise continues to displace and harm millions.
Millionaires are being created at an ever increasing rate but are far outnumbered by increases in the number of disadvantaged. Yet money and status are still the number one factors considered as indicators of ‘success’ by most. Our government, as are many others, is obsessed with keeping people out, restricting civil liberties and ignoring many of its human rights obligations. Contrary to the lying rhetoric of government politicians, care for our people barely touches the agenda, compassion is non-existent and our nation is increasingly nationalistic and repressive.
There is much about which to be depressed.
Agreed Nonsibi, the British ruling classes quickly forgot the sacrifice they demanded of the British working classes during WWII to protect their own accumulated wealth and social privilege, suppressing all demands for post war social reform and social justice, that sadly continues through to today with the Brexit disaster where a wealthy few stand to make significant financial gains from these unprincipled actions.
Many of us here on AIMN are passionate about social justice and social equity, choose to advocate loudly rather than bang our heads against the brick wall of public indifference. Remember, we stopped the Vietnam War with these tactics.
Very kind words, gentlemen, and truly appreciated.
NEC, to which emoji do you refer?