Have just completed my weekly constitutional stroll through St John's Online, so I thought it was time for a Blog entry to let you all know where we're at.

Janey and I tend to monitor the site on a fairly reglar basis, usually at least once a day, more often it's 5 or 6 times a day. Don't be fooled by our lack of post, we do keep at least one eye squinted in the direction of St John's Online. :-)

Anyhow, my Saturday morning constitutional normally involves routing through the user list to see how many spammers have tried to infiltrate our little haven. I normally end up deleting about 10 to 15 accounts which are obviously spammers trying to get access. Thankfully, none of these unscrupulous so and so's have ever made it through the security system so the blogs and the forum have so far been free from unwanted messages.

One thing to note though, if you sign up using an anonymous username and email address, please make sure you identify yourself as friendly in the introduce yourself section of the forum, or send the web team a private email letting us know you're a real person. I'm finding myself having to get more and more brutal with the administration of these users, and I'd hate to delete a real member by mistake.

I'd also like to thank Debbie for warning us about a possible virus attack on the St John's site. The virus/malware seemed to be associated with the Countdown Timer, so that was removed in short order. I've subsequently scanned the site using as many different virus scanners as I have access to, and the site came back clean. Being the untrusting person I am, the search for the malware didn't stop there. This morning, I started searching through the code of this site to look for any dormant nasties...

The bad news is, I found some. :-(

The good news is that it is now gone. :-)

I have no idea what this errant code was meant to do, and I didn't leave ot there long enough to do any damage. But I will be analysing the site much more frequently in future as despite all the security, someone managed to hack this site. Fear not though, Janey and I are well and truly on the case, so we've changed all the passwords to the server, and given St John's a clean bill of health.

OK, now I've got the boring geeky stuff out of the way, lets get onto some interesting facts.

St John's Online has:

• 30 members
• 983 individual pages
• 36 megabytes of database
• Over 150 megabytes of photos in the gallery

To paraphrase Peter Jones:

"St John's Online, is big. REALLY big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the street to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to St Johns Online” :-)

The great thing about it is that most of the content comes from you lot, many thanks and keep up the good work.

Paul