Emails from HCC: Now With 10% Less Dysfunctional Hilarity

We had a bit of a meltdown on Sunday night after the old, forgotten email account of certain HCC co-founder whose name rhymes with Zippie but who will go unnamed here was hacked, and our server was used to send out approximately ten billion spam emails advertising nard wax. This doesn't directly impact anyone here, aside from the fact that the site ran slowly for a few hours while this was happening and we almost got kicked off our server over it. But I managed to yank the plug in time and convince the company we lease this space from that we don't sell nard wax, so we're okay now.

But after combing through the site logs and seeing the berserk attempted hacking onslaught that HCC is under 24/7, I wasn't real eager to turn our mail server back on, since even just the volume of failed attempts was slowing down the site. Since I only use the server to send account activation and password reset emails, I opted to figure out a better way to do that instead.

And after only a few short hours of banging my face on the dishwasher repeatedly and realizing these Time/Life books are no help at all when it comes to website administration, I've managed to code a new system that uses Gmail to send our site emails instead. This means two things for you guys: (1) You should receive the site emails much more reliably now, as they won't be coming from a server that's on every spam blacklist on Earth (this also applies to me actually receiving messages sent by cappers from the HCC email form); and (2) You can use Microsoft email addresses now. Hotmail, MSN, Outlook.com, whatever your Bill Gates boner has led you to prefer. They won't be blocking the emails coming from HCC now. Huzzah!

One more minor improvement I made to the site a few weeks back: I've made it possible to add chat comments to thread pages. Some threads make a lot more sense when you can see the chat comments they originated from, or that moved them forward in some important way, so there you go. This used to only work in Custom Galleries, now it works for thread pages too. When you click the "plus" sign at the end of a chat comment you'll now have the option to add it to a thread page or a custom gallery:



That's it! I hope you're all enjoying the summer by huddling inside around your monitors, cursing the sun. See you in the gallery.

love,
Jazz