Mood:  irritated

I first set up my Guest Book in September 2001 when my website was still in its birth throes and the first people to sign it were my nephew, my son and my evening class tutor followed about six weeks later by my cousin, Michel. I decided to submit my URL to the search engines in November 2001 and waited several months for my site to be indexed. Then two more signatures appeared in July 2002 and one of my Spanish nieces found me in September 2002 and signed it too. One more signature was added in November and this was the first time I realised that Tripod had failed to send me a notification email to say my book had been signed. By the time I discovered the entry, it seemed rather too late to send a `thank you for signing' email.

In 2003, I had 13 entries, including my son again, my daughter and one I put in myself to reply to someone who had left a private entry together with an email address which did not work! Of the rest, I had to delete one and I had to remove the homepage link plus a large picture link from another one inviting everyone to visit the owner's website. (I followed that link only to find myself looking at a ghastly photograph of the rear end of an unfortunate weightlifter who had suffered a severe rectal prolapse. Ugghh!) This unpleasant experience made me change my open format to a moderated one sometime in July 2003. One more signature appeared on 27th February 2004. After that, nothing....

I began to feel extremely depressed about my Guest Book. I must be doing something wrong or perhaps signing Guest Books was just going out of fashion? Certainly, leaving an email link* anywhere on the Internet could result in unwanted Spam flooding your inbox, as I had already found out! Perhaps I could change the format completely? I thought of changing it to a 'Sign for World Peace' Book but I would have liked to include a 'light a candle' feature and I had no idea how to do that. I wrote to my cousin at Christmas and told him I would probably remove the Guest Book as no one was signing it. In mid-January, I finally did just that and removed all the links to my Guest Book from several pages.

Then late last Sunday afternoon, I decided to see what changes could be made to the Tripod Guest Book format if I started again; and so I logged into Gear Manager. That's when I discovered that there were a large (for me!) number of entries all waiting to be approved for publication. I had not received any email notifications. I was furious with Tripod and I ranted and raged until I could see my husband wasn`t listening anymore. I was also very upset that people had not seen their entries appear and extremely mortified that I had not been able to thank anyone for their comments. I searched the Help pages at Lycos/Tripod to see if there were any alerts regarding technical problems with email notification. Finally, late Sunday evening, I filled in the form to report an error.

Monday afternoon, a reply arrives from Lycos Customer Support:

Dear Tessa,
The Tripod/HTML Gear Mail Servers are not functioning properly due to a misconfiguration error. Some members may receive delayed notification emails after their Guestbooks or Feedback forms were signed by visitors a while back. The error is not the result of an action on your part and all of the signed entries are kept in our database. We apologize for the inconvenience that may have caused you".

A misconfiguration error that is eleven months old! Tripod - that is just not good enough!

I will be reinstating my Guest Book links on my website as soon as possible and in the meantime, my sincere apologies to all those visitors who never saw their entries appear. I will alter the settings to "open" and I will have to check on a daily basis until Tripod resolves this technical mess or I find a more reliable Guest Book from somewhere else. In the meantime, I am still feeling extremely MIFFED! (Yes, I know, it's bad for my high blood pressure and I am trying to calm down).

Well, wouldn't you be annoyed? Also, I feel a complete Nerd for assuming my Guest Book was an utter failure and for not checking out Gear Manager on a regular basis - that was really stupid of me. Why didn't I think to look - anyone else would have checked it out except yours truly and ..... Arrghh... I must calm down, I must calm down, I must calm down...