An exchange of emails with Mark over at bsdbox.co a day or so ago made me realise that my privacy policy needed updating. Not, I hasten to add, for any fundamental reason, but simply because a couple of the references in that policy were out of date. I have therefore amended it and version 0.2.0 is now in place. As promised in the policy, this post draws attention to the changes.
The amendments I have made are as follows:
I have amended my reference to geo-locating IP addresses because I stopped using the off-site “clustrmaps” tool some time ago. I now point out that I collect aggregate IP address geo-location data incidentally through my use of Counterize. However, as I note in the policy, I may drop Counterize shortly because it is becoming a drain on the site. Unlike static web log analysis tools, Counterize runs a script in real time to update its database. That database is now getting too large for my liking and some of the (automatic) queries it runs are not well optimised. I haven’t spent any long time investigating this, largely because my MySQL DB skills are woefully inadequate, but it looks to me as if some of the fields are not properly indexed to allow fast queries.
As an aside, readers may care to note that Counterize reports that I get between 30,000 and 40,000 hits on trivia each month and the top visiting countries are: the US at 57.8%, China at 13.6%, the EU at 6.8% and the Russian Federation at 4.5%. The dear old UK is eighth at 2.4% just ahead of Canada and the Ukraine. Those stats might look odd until you realise that I have allowed Counterize to include known webcrawlers. The biggest of these of course are based in the US, but Baidu in China is not far behind in its activity.
I have changed my references to the captcha and contact forms I use on trivia because I have stopped using Mike Challis’s plugins. I did this because Mike seems to like to update his plugins every other week or so and, much as that is to be applauded if there are real gains to be made, I found the maintenance overhead to be too high for what I was getting. Stability is good too.
Incidentally, for anyone interested in FreeBSD, particularly in its use on a server running Tor, or a website it is well worth paying a visit to Mark’s blog. He writes well and it is always worth looking at alternatives to Linux.