I normally blog about stuff more directly related to my being a femme top and professional domina, but (as I say somewhere in my biography) I am a software professional - otherwise known as a geek. And as it happens, I developed and maintain this website. So when things go wrong, I get to fix them!

So... There is usually a steady stream of emails coming in from my contact page - from clients waiting to arrange a session. But over the past few days, I started to notice a slow down. In fact, once I noticed it, I realized that I hadn't seen any emails at all for a few days.

So earlier today, I finally got around to checking it out. And found that the contact email form was broken. The form is set up to use Mollom, which is a third party service that checks emails for spam. In this case, my website is built using Drupal, and there is a Mollom module for Drupal that you can just drop in to the website, which seamlessly provides the spam checking function. Or not in this case!

After some rooting around, I realized that emails were being flagged as spam almost instantaneously, and when I checked the statistics on the back-end Mollom servers, my test emails didn't show up at all (as spam or otherwise). They never even left the website. Which led to me to suspect the drop-in Mallom module.

When I checked the global module update status, I found that quite a few modules were down level - that there were updates available for them. And there was an update available for the Mollom module too. Now you wouldn't think that the fact that my existing installed Mollom module was slightly out of date would result in all email being classified as spam, but it did, and once I updated the Mollom module to the latest version, the contact form started working again.

Phew! But I wonder how many eager clients gave up when they couldn't even contact me?

More globally, I've always worked on the principle that if something is working, don't change it - a version of "if it isn't broke, don't fix it". But this little incident looks more like "software rot" - where if you have have a stable software system, and just leave it alone, eventually it starts to degrade. I'm still nervous of always upgrading to the latest and greatest, but it does look like more active maintenance is required...

Ms Emilie