We are receiving several support tickets from users complaining about Yahoo! users being unable to send them emails. Please be aware that Yahoo! currently has several of their IPs listed in Spam Cop, a spam blacklisting service.

Users are reporting bounce back messages that say something like:

Remote host said: 550 Blocked – see http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml?98.139.213.138

Please understand there is nothing we can do about this. This is an issue between Yahoo! and Spamcop. Apparently from what we have been able to find, a Yahoo! user exploited their services to send out spam messages and they hit a spam trap email address (a spam trap address is an email address that exists only for the purpose of collecting spam. Any mail that is received at a designated spam trap address is unsolicited).

I would encourage any Yahoo! user that is affected by this to voice their concerns with Yahoo! Finding a contact link for Yahoo! is difficult, so it would seem that twitter might be the best way to contact them concerning this. You can find Yahoo’s twitter account at @YahooCare.

Nobody likes to receive spam and it would appear that Yahoo!’s policies make it far to easy for spammers to use their network to send out unsolicited messages.

Steven

Update: October 3, 2013 1:17PM CDT The latest link of information on this can be found here. Apparently Yahoo! is blaming Spamcop and Spamcop is blaming Yahoo! so it may be a while before this is resolved.

We have seen a flurry of accounts being hacked due to outdated Joomla! Content Editor components (JCE). Because of this we have made the decision to go through all of our servers are remove/disable all outdated JCE components.

The reason for this is because these accounts with outdated JCE components are being hacked into, compromised, and used to send out spam. This affects the integrity of our servers and is not fair to other users on the server that are keeping their scripts and components up to date, to have to deal with a server that is blacklisted for sending out spam.

It seems that a large portion of our users are unable or unaware of the need to keep their scripts, components, plugins, extensions, and themes up to date. Disabling these outdated JCE components will hopefully bring to light why it is so important to keep things up to date.

The latest version of the Joomla! Content Editor (as of May 30, 2013) is 2.3.2.4. If you are not using 2.3.2.4 then your version is outdated and potentially dangerous. That is why it has been disabled/removed. The website for the Joomla! Content Editor is:

http://www.joomlacontenteditor.net

We wanted our users to be aware of this.

Steven

Searching engine ranking based on a website’s IP address is still a topic that has a lot of discussion. A lot of people still believe that in order to maximize their search engine ranking, specifically with Google, that they must have a dedicated IP. This is a myth. This has been stated several times by people and developers from inside Google.

Matt Cutts is a developer for Google. He runs a blog – http://www.mattcutts.com – where he discusses some of the ins and outs of the Google algorithm. He made a post way back in 2006, where he actually reference a slashdot post from Craig Silverstein, Google’s Director of Technology, concerning this:

I can’t just deny it? What are my other choices? Actually, Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses. If your ISP does virtual hosting correctly, you’ll never see a difference between the two cases. We do see a small percentage of ISPs every month that misconfigure their virtual hosting, which might account for this persistent misperception–thanks for giving me the chance to dispel a myth!

Why is this important?

You may have heard recently, and if you haven’t you will in the coming months, about the death of IPv4 address space. IPv4 allows for a maximum of 4,294,967,296 IP addresses. That may seem like a lot, but keep in mind the world’s people population currently stand at about 6,973,738,433. That’s a difference of 2,678,771,137. Also factor in that of the 4,294,967,296 IPv4 address space, you have to dedicated about 18,000,000 for private networks (which aren’t Internet routable) and 270,000,000 multicast IP addresses. That leaves you with only 4,006,967,296. Again, that may seem like a lot. But just think, every Internet connection, every smartphone, every Internet connected device, every web server, requires at least 1 of those IP addresses. There just aren’t a lot of available IPv4 addresses any more. We can’t get them, our datacenter partners can’t get them, they’re just not there to get. IP allocation systems (ARIN in North America) are being much more strict with their requirements for releasing IP addresses, so that only users that really need a dedicated IP address will be able to get them.

In order to consolidate IPv4 space, the HTTP 1.1 protocol revision was written to allow for “VirtualHosts” on a web server. This essentially allows a web server to disperse web traffic based on the hostname that is sent along with each HTTP packet, instead of via an IP address, allowing IP address space on a web server to be shared. Google, Bing, and all of the major search engine providers know this. They would be fools if they did not. Perhaps it used to be common place for websites to have their own dedicated IP address, this is no longer a requirement (accept for in case of SSL secure certificates, but that’s another topic, and most websites do not have SSL secure certificates).

If you haven’t heard about the death of IPv4 you will soon. The Internet is very quickly approaching a move to IPv6 which allows for many, many, many more addresses (approximately 3.4 x 10³⁸).

So how does this affect search engine ranking?

Having a dedicated IP address has no bearings on your pagerank. If you really want to improve your search engine ranking, then you need to focus on the content, the quality of content of your website and get others to legitimately link to your site. If your sole purpose of building sites is to link back and forth with the hope of increasing your page rank, this is a violation of Google guidelines, and it won’t matter if you are on a dedicate IP address or not, this type of activity will have a negative impact on your pagerank.

This is discussed specifically from Google:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356

The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it. Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?

So pagerank and search engine visibility is based much more on content than anything else. If you have solid content that people want to read about, this is the number one thing that will move you up the search engine ladder.

So remember, if you want to increase your pagerank and your visibility on search engine result pages, a dedicated IP address is not necessary for this. SEO techniques that advise a dedicated IP address are a marketing ploy used by companies to try and get more money from you. If you really want to improve your pagerank you need to focus on the content of your website and getting legitimate users to link to your site. If you try to circumvent Google’s pageranking system by building link farms and backlinks, then this can have a negative impact on your site’s pagerank, defeating the whole point of the links.

Steven

We are still seeing a lot of issues with the PHP 5.3 upgrade we are rolling out. Please understand that this is an upgrade that has to happen. All software has to be upgraded eventually. This is why you do not see very many companies still using MSDOS 6 and Windows 3.1 or Windows 95/98. Microsoft stopped supporting those pieces of software and companies have to decide do they want to prop it up and support it in-house – which requires a ton of resources and means that you just fall further and further behind as future upgrades are delivered to the public – or they could upgrade and upgrade their underlying software and procedures to work with the updated operating system.

This is what is happening with PHP 5.3 (and later PHP 5.4 and PHP 6, and so on). We are having to upgrade in order to fall in line with what is publicly available. Unfortunately we do not have the resources to support PHP 5.2 on our own, and even if we did, we would have users wanting the features and benefits of PHP 5.3 and later versions, making it not only impossible to indefinitely support PHP 5.2, but also making it unwise.

I implore you to check the scripts you have installed on your website. Find out what version you have installed, what the latest version of that script is, and if that script is compatible with PHP 5.3. You should also check and make sure that any plugins, components, extensions, or themes, or anything pertaining to your scripts is up to date and compatible with PHP 5.3. We have seen some issues where a script, such as Zen Cart, is up to date, but an addon module being used on the Zen Cart install is not up to date and not compatible with PHP 5.3. This breaks the functionality of the website in PHP 5.3 even though the base script (in this case Zen Cart) is up to date.

Insuring that your scripts are up to date is the best way you can insure that your website will remain functioning when PHP is upgraded on your server.

How do you do this?

1. Know what scripts are installed on your website. Are you using a popular script or scripts to drive your website? Are you using a script that you downloaded from another website and installed on your website? Are you using a custom made script, either made by you or someone you hired? These are questions that you need to know the answers to. We can help you identify some of the scripts on your website, but unfortunately we can’t identify everything. For example, if you are using “Joe’s PHP Website Creator” to drive your website, we may not know anything about it. “Joe’s PHP Website Creator” (this is a fake script name we are using to underline the point that there are many non-descript PHP scripts available on the web) isn’t a very popular script so we have no way of identifying it. If you installed something on your website, you should know about it.

2. Know what extensions/components/plugins/addon modules/themes you have installed for this script on your website. These terms all just signify extra packages you can install inside a script on your website to extend it’s functionality. WordPress refers to these as plugins. Joomla! refers to these as components. The terms essentially mean the same thing. A theme is like an extension that tells the base script how to display information on your website. Unfortunately, these are all inside a script. We really don’t have a sure-fire way of identifying what plugins you have installed. For example, we have a procedure for identifying WordPress scripts installed on our servers. But we have no way of knowing what plugins and themes and extensions you have installed on that WordPress script. There are just too many plugins and extensions available for WordPress for us to be able to accurately identify them. The same is true for Joomla! and any other script.

3. Once you have a list of the installed scripts and their versions and the installed extensions for each of those scripts and their version, then you need to contact the developers of that script and find out if those versions are compatible with PHP 5.3.

Most of the popular scripts, such as WordPress and Joomla! have community forums where you can interact with other users of these scripts and ask questions. I would recommend asking there, if what you have installed is compatible with PHP 5.3. Note: I would not recommend disclosing your website in these community forums.

Some of the popular scripts and their support forums and communities are below:

WordPress – http://wordpress.org/support

Joomla! – http://forum.joomla.org

Drupal – http://drupal.org/forum

phpBB – http://www.phpbb.com/community

SMF – http://www.simplemachines.org/community

Gallery – http://gallery.menalto.com/forum

Coppermine – http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net

Zen Cart – http://www.zen-cart.com/forum.php

Moodle – http://moodle.org/forums

These are just some scripts, there are many other scripts available. You would just have to identify what scripts you have installed, what extensions you have installed, and then find a community forum or contact link for the developer of those scripts or extensions. Some scripts may not have a community forum and you may have to contact the developer directly.

If you are unable to find the developer or any contact information for the developer of the script or if the developer does not respond to your inquiries, then this can be a sign that the script you are using is an abandoned project. The problem with an abandoned project is that it is no longer being maintained. If you are using an abandoned project as a script on your website, then your website may be open to various, unknown, and unpatched security holes. If you find out that you are using an abandoned project, then you really need to investigate using a newer script. You can try and keep using the script with PHP 5.3, but there’s no guarantees that it will work with PHP 5.3. This is part of the price that is paid when you decide to use an abandoned and unmaintained script.

4. If you are using a custom made script, either written by you or if you hired someone to develop the script for you. You either need to contact that developer or research this yourself. If you wrote your own script, you should have an idea of what it does and how it does what it does. I would encourage you to read through PHP’s guide to migrating to PHP 5.3 from PHP 5.2:

http://www.php.net/migration53

5. Once you have identified if your scripts are compatible with PHP 5.3 or if there is an upgrade path available to you to make you PHP 5.3 compatible, I would recommend upgrading and following that path as soon as possible (assuming that the upgrade path is safe for non-PHP 5.3 environments). This will help insure that your website remains only when it is transitioned to PHP 5.3.

These are steps you can take to insure a smoother transition from PHP 5.2 to PHP 5.3 for your website. If you have used the same script for many months or many years without have to upgrade it or maintain it, then this is probably more of a sign that your script will not be compatible with PHP 5.3. The value of a script isn’t ranked by how few upgrades and few maintenance steps it requires, the true value of a script is how well it is maintained, how often the developers release updates to the script to fix security holes and other bugs. A developer or software group that ignores the progression of the PHP language and does not readily update their scripts performs poorer than a developer or software group that stays on top of the latest PHP language developments and how to properly utilize those developments.

Steven

We are again scheduling the server maverick.wznoc.com for transition to PHP 5.3 by default. This event is scheduled for Tuesday, July 17th.

As with our previous post we are making this change to bring our servers more up to date with the current state of PHP.

To find out what server your account is on and if you are affected by this transition see our server identification tool at:

http://amshelp.com/identify.php

You need to insure that all of your scripts are up to date and compatible with PHP 5.3 before this transition is made. If you need help determining what scripts and what version of the scripts you have installed, contact us and we can help you.

Below is a list of popular scripts that are known to support PHP 5.3.

– WordPress

– Joomla! 1.5 (version 1.5.15+)

– Joomla! 2.5

– Drupal 6+

– phpBB3

– SMF

– Gallery

– Coppermine

– phpList

– Zen Cart (version 1.3.9+)

– Moodle

We strongly encourage you to keep your scripts up-to-date. Even if you don’t feel that it is necessary for you to update your script, please understand that failing to keep a script up to date is the number one reason why websites are hacked and defaced.

Steven