After six weeks without blogging, I am now back at it. Blogs will continue to be a bit irregular over the next month or two.
As some of you undoubtedly noticed, AFANA.com was off-line for about 32 hours beginning late Thursday night into Saturday. On Wednesday evening, without warning, our site was taken off line by our hosting company. We then spent the next day and a half trying to get the situation resolved. Not a fun way to spend a holiday.
Our hosting company in turn buys it's service from another company and I will not name either company here. It's alleged that the higher service provider received a complaint from AOL that we had sent sp*m to an AOL user. Nothing could be further from the truth. We're meticulous here about avoiding any possible interpretation that any of the mail we send out is unsolicited e-mail. We drop any repeated bounces from our lists and we honor all unsubscribe requests promptly without complaint. If you haven't asked for it by subscribing or joining AFANA you don't get anything from our e-mailing lists. We hate unsolicited e-mail at AFANA and we get hundreds of such messages a day.
When we finally, after some 16 hours, got a copy of the header of the supposed $pam message it was immediately apparent (and would have been to anyone with minimal skills at reading headers) that it didn't originate from us and had nothing to do with us. In fact, three of our own AFANA users received the same s&am. I then contacted AOL and surprise! surprise! they have NO complaints lodged against us and haven't blocked mail from AFANA. So, wherever the complaint came from, it wasn't AOL. The AOL ISP desk categorically denies making such a complaint.
Our site was restored to service after another 15 hours of waiting. How much did this cost us? We will probably never know for sure. What we do know is that many visitors were likely befuddled by the "site suspended" message they received if they tried to visit our site and we surely lost some potential new members. This also likely impacted our ranking on Google. Are we glad to be back online? You betcha.
Moral of the story: in today's online world, you are guilty until proven innocent. If your hosting company or their provider wants to make your life difficult with (or more importantly without) justification, they can do so and your recourse is probably limited to the courts. Good luck. Where else can your company be put out of business without due process of law?
We were planning to move our site to a new host in December anyway. Now that move will take place even quicker than originally planned. As a result there might well be a brief interruption of service sometime in the next week or so. Additionally, after the move, it will take us a few days to test and make sure the site is working properly. So, if you have any problems please call or e-mail us so we can get right on to the issues.
Another issue is the future of TV coverage. We're hopeful that we will have some news on that front very soon. I remain confident that footy will be somewhere on US and Canadian TV in 2004. Expect much more information here and a TV newsletter in a few weeks after we relocate our site to a new host.
-Rob (who did finally get some sleep last night...)
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I can well recommend my host Onsmart.net who have been great.
Posted by: Scott Wickstein at November 30, 2003 09:46 PMThanks, Scott. I'll have a look into them.
Posted by: Rob de Santos at November 30, 2003 10:01 PMhi Rob
I've been trawling the net for American Aussie rules sites for some time now and it is all very exiting, promising and seems to be growing at an amazing pace, the development of the game in the U.S that is, still I wold like to get some Idea of the current climate of development because I'm not quite sure if reading articles by enthusiasts is the best indicator but there are a few issues I find interesting and would like more info on
eg. this arizona team from the millitary: will this be a trend to be taken up by other sectors of the armed forces
:I hear alot about university participation
:what about minorities, I remember years ago being given the impression that rules was popular amongst latino americans on the west coast is this true? was it ever?
Is there or will there ever be a magazine publication for usfooty and if not, is it not feasable as yet.
Brentonb,
I don't know much about the Arizona military team but my off the top of the head thinking would be that it wouldn't represent a trend. I say that for several reasons... one is that two thirds of the military are now reservists, another is that the deployment rate among the active military is at a post WWII high, and finally, there are many fewer military bases with troops on base then there were a generation ago.
University participation is likely to grow since that represents a huge potential market for new players and is a very "sports oriented" segment of society. Many of the existing leaders of AFANA, myself included, became fans while watching the sport on TV during our university years.
I've never heard anything suggesting that latino participation was higher or lower than expected anywhere. Minority participation is a general problem though but I'm not aware of any effort by either the AFL or their USfooty arm to address it. Maybe someone else can enlighten us on that.
A magazine is problematical from my point of view. AFANA has struggled to get enough staff and writers to do a quarterly newsletter throughout our history. Doing a newspaper or glossy mag would soak up so much money and resources I don't see it happening soon. We can't get fans to give us $5 a year to support our existing operations and getting them to pay for a glossy is too far out at this stage. I suppose that USfooty could "tax" their base of players by upping annual participation fees to pay for it if they wanted to.
sorry Rob please excuse my ignorance but the team I was refering to is the Mjave greens.
Also the item regarding latino suporters was if I can recall from the eighties where broadcasts of AFL were covered in spanish, the commentator had a great time calling out AAAAAAAblett in the Rex Hunt stlyle and was Later that year( whatever it was ) invited to the grand final by the AFL
Cheers,Brenton
Brenton,
The voice over of AFL broadcasts in Spanish for Latin America was ended about 3 or 4 years ago when neither the AFL nor the networks (i.e. FOX) wanted to pay for it. I think the Spanish broadcaster (Canal+) still does it for their audience but there isn't a single telecast of the sport to any Central or South American country nor to the Spanish speaking audience in the US / Canada / Mexico. The telecasts never impacted the US Latino audience from what we can tell. I would say that over the past half dozen years AFANA has had less than 5 inquiries from Mexico about the sport. Another example of current AFL attitudes.
I hadn't heard much about the Mojave Greens but I'm sure somewhere else around here has and can fill us in.
Posted by: Rob de Santos at December 11, 2003 12:06 PMHey to you guys... I am a Full Forward for the Mojave Greens out of Fort Irwin, CA for the USArmy. Yeah, as I hope you hear more about us as time goes, we are a legitimate organization hoping to rally up in the CAFL. We are 100% American and doing our best to bring our skills up to Aussie speed. If you have any questions about our team or how we fare.. just go to www.mojavegreens.com and talk to our President and Head Coach David Payne. I am sure he will be happy to field any questions about what we have going on and will enjoy the attention. Thanks guys, and keep up the footy, it's good stuff! Adam Howarth (citizencory@aol.com)
Posted by: Adam Howarth at March 2, 2004 11:47 PMGood to hear from you Adam. I got an e-mail just yesterday from David Payne. As soon as he sends some info on to our webmaster, we'll get your club linked up on our US football page. Good luck with your efforts.
Posted by: Rob de Santos at March 3, 2004 12:52 AM