PrefBlog

Assiduous Readers will notice that most posts from the old server have been imported successfully.

Alert Assiduous Readers will further notice that the last two years are missing.

I don’t know why.

I will attempt to figure this out once I’ve calmed down a little.

Update: There are 1,163 missing posts; everything with a post ID >= 16,886. Oddly, #16869 was successfully imported, but #16864 was skipped. This cutoff point looks suspiciously close to 2^14 = 16,384, but I don’t know if that’s significant.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

As many of you will know, my old server is retiring after seven years or so of sterling service.

A new server has been rented and is now hosting several sites, PrefInfo.com among them. I am now transferring the others.

This will probably involve PrefBlog being down for a while, for the period between propogation of the DNS change and the time when I upload the data to the new server – for reasons that I don’t understand and my simply reflect my lack of knowledge, I can’t install the PrefBlog software and data on the new machine until the DNS change has propogated.

So long, 70.86.75.42 ! It’s time for 184.172.98.210 to take over!

It took me five-years-odd to reach 100,100 spam comments marked for deletion … another 86,509 have been removed for this New Year’s Cleaning!

Isn’t the Internet wonderful?

Hymas Investment Management Inc. is required to have a Complaint Examination Policy due to its registration with the Autorité des marchés financiers.

Accordingly, a Complaints Policy has been prepared and is linked on the corporate website through the page Ethical Standards.

In the post 100,100 Spam Comments Deleted from PrefBlog (which got a spam comment an hour ago), the suggestion was made that first-time comments be held for moderation. This proposal was seconded and passed unanimously.

Accordingly, first time comments will be held for moderation – I will approve almost anything that isn’t spam.

The spam has really slowed down in the New Year – only about 100 per day, down from the peak of about 500/day reached in early- to mid-December; but I’m making the change anyway.

One of the great curses of internet blogs is spam comments.

On PrefBlog, I have an ‘open comment’ policy – you have to sign in, but comments are posted immediately (they are not held for approval). If anybody wants to comment, I say, then what’s the big deal?

Many dubious characters take advantage of this and post links to their malware sites, scraper sites, ad-sites, you name it. There are various ‘bulk pinging’ sites on the net that makes this easy for script-kiddies. It’s annoying and if there’s too much spam on the site then Google et al. will assume that the site itself is spam – not something I want for PrefBlog.

So my blog software allows for the automatic checking of posted comments, blacklisting some and holding others for moderation, depending on whether it matches anything in a specified list of keywords. One of my daily tasks is to clean out the comments and update my keyword lists.

And today I reached a milestone: over 100,000 spam comments have been posted since PrefBlog began publishing. And today I’ve greatly reduced the size of the database by permanently deleting all comments marked as spam.

Other statistics of interest: 4,302 posts in 32 categories; 6,833 approved comments (mostly trackbacks, in which one post refers to another and leaves a track-back comment. I like this feature).

Last June, I made the sad announcement that CANNEX Annuity Rate Data No Longer Available.

It’s back! Annuity Rate Data is now published on-line by the Globe & Mail; a link to these data is posted in the right-hand navigation panel, under “Quotes (Delayed)”.

CANNEX Annuity Rate Data, formerly published by Canadian Business is no longer being made freely available by any media source of which I am aware.

I have made inquiries and been told that:

Given that you are seeking to publicly distribute our rates, the fee is $550.00 / month.

Sorry, folks, I’m not paying that!

Accordingly, the link to “Annuity Rates” that used to be in the right-hand panel in the group “Quotes (Delayed)” has been deleted.

It’s too bad that Canadian insurance companies don’t compete on price, or all this information would be freely available on their websites. Many thanks to Assiduous Reader BM, who pointed out to me that the link given in my article The Annuity Decision no longer works.