Wednesday, July 16, 2014

You May Have Noticed (You Haven't Noticed)

All mp3 files on the Self Help Radio home page are now password protected.  I know!  I complained about it yesterday & today it's like, wow!  The username & password are on the front page, in a sort-of but not obvious place.  It's this paragraph:

(You can click it to make it bigger.)

I didn't want to write USERNAME: + PASSWORD: but I didn't want it to be hard to find, either.

Why is this happening?  Well, a couple of weeks ago, someone created a kind of program which went through my site & downloaded all the files.  This is a problem because there are a lot of radio shows there, & my web provider got mad at me (although it wasn't my fault) & shut down my site.  I begged & pleaded & did a few things that were probably useless, & my site reappeared.

Then, last week, it happened again.  I did more begging & pleading & a lot of reasoning.  My site came back up but it seemed obvious I needed to do something else.

Here's the thing: very few people know about my radio show, & there a smaller subset of those folks who listen to it.  (A smaller number, I would say, like it enough to download whole episodes.)  So when there's suddenly someone downloading (in a small span of time) 73 episodes, it's probably someone causing mischief.  Password-protection can hinder most of these situations, although, as one technical support person mentioned to me, there are people out there who can write sophisticated programs, too.  I hope I'm not on those folks' radars.

I hope that this doesn't keep people from listening to or discovering my dumb little radio show, & in that spirit, I will mention that, if you can't find the username on the web site (for whatever reason), & you can't find it written somewhere on the Facebook page, then I can only perhaps suggest that if you had to have a username, it might as well be SHR, & if you had to have a password, it might as well be selfhelp.

At this point, it's the best I can do.

Now let's hope I can put all this drama behind me.

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