A few days ago, the database was deleted. Therefore there are now no ads at all (at the moment of this writing). I do not know why it was deleted but I suspect it had something to do with my complaint to the webhost about frequent error messages. They said they were investigating the script error but never replied regarding the deletion of the database.

Regarding the following error message (which has occurred frequently the past month):
" Forbidden You don't have permission to access /nf-errors/cgi-cutoff.asis on this server. Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request. "

The webhost explained the above error message like this:
" The reason you are receiving this error message is that you are attempting to use too many resources on your hosting plan. The Netfirms Basic hosting plan is severely limited in the amount of resources, or processing power a CGI script is allotted. To remove this error, please upgrade your account to one of our premium paid plans. "

Well, I am not going to pay for webhosting this site. I do know there are other webhosts offering free sites with CGI-access, for example the sites listed here:
http://www.free-webhosts.com/free-cgi-web-hosting.php
However, I would like to avoid experimenting with all these hosts and moving around until I find some host that seems to work okay. So, if you do have good experience with any free webhosts (perl/CGI), then please tell me. I need a free host which will allow execution of CGI-scripts written in perl, and I also need to be able to use the "CGI" and "DB_File" modules. If you want to recommend some webhost, then please tell me for how long you have used that webhost, and if you have had some problems with it, and for what site you have used it (URL please) and if the site has lots of users and it still works okay with many users ?

Now there are some direct ad links to each ad from the search result page. This makes it possible to link directly to your ad from some other site. There is also a new webform at the homepage, where you can write an ad ID if you have seen such an LoneMatch ID at some other site.

I just want to mention that the following problem can occurr (unfortunately quite frequently it seems):

Method Not Allowed
The requested method POST is not allowed for the URL /nf-errors/cgi-cutoff.asis.

Now the site is up and running again, after having been down for a long period of time (and to be quite honest, I simply have not had time or enough with interest to try to fix the problem sooner). Anyway, the problem was that the path to the database seemed to have changed so that the program no longer could find the database file. Probably the free web host moved some files and did some changes of the file structure (for unnknown reason) which changed the path to the database file.

Also, regarding email that you may have sent me, I also confess that I have not logged in often into the email account lately, and in fact unfrequent enough so that I now had got my email address deactivated, with all (possible) existing unread emails deleted.

The old forwarding email-address lonematch@shy.as does not seem to have been working very well. Unfortunately I do not know for how long it has been unreliable without forwarding email as it should have done. The new address is: lomtch@yahoo.co.uk

The mail function does not seem to work, and that means that you can not get a password sent to your email address and you can not reply to the old ads without visible email. I am sorry, but I do not know when or if I will have time to try to fix it.

Therefore, if you want to create an ad, you will have to send me an email and then I will manually send you a password you can use.

All new ads are now always created with visible email-adresses. Before this date you could choose a reply form instead. The old ads, however, where the advertieser chose the reply form have not been changed and does not show the email in the ad.

Now the advertisers can choose to show their email instead of showing a reply form in their ads, though the possibility to use the reply form remains.
Update 14th of December 2003: You can not choose the reply form anymore but all new ads will show the email.

Unfortunately the entire content of the lonematch database was deleted the other day, not by me though, perhaps by some hacker...? Anyway, there is not anything to do about it now. It is not possible to recreate the content of the database because the free webhost netfirms only do backups for paying customers. This means that everybody who had ads and want to continue with their ads, needs to recreate their ads themselves. Also, every lonematch user (people creating ads or people wanting to respond to ads) needs to get a new password and username because the old ones will not work anymore.

Note: Those of you who have been communicating anonymously with someone through lonematch reply form (and thus do not have the real email address of the person) will not be able to continue doing that (to that old username) because the database has been deleted and there is no possibility to find out which email-address was connected to a certain username in the old, now non-exisiting database. What you then should do, to be able to reestablish contact with that person, is to make an ad dedicated to trying to find that person. To avoid this problem in the future, if database deletion would happen again, you can choose to (when replying to an ad or after having gotten reply to an ad) reveal your email-address to the person. Then you are not depending on the existance of a connection (in the lonematch database) between a username and which email-address to forward emails to that username to.

There has been problems with lonematch before, more specifically only 3-4 months ago (see the note below from the 11th of Mars). For those of you who are sick and tired of these problems, and wants to send me an email with complaints, I would first like to say the following:

• You have not paid anything to use the site
• I have not made any money at all of the site
• I have already done quite a lot of unpaid work with programming the site when it was created about three years ago
• I do not now have the right time and interest to work with the site, and regularly taking backups of the database myself
• I do not want to pay for a webhost (which would mean that I could require them to take backups)
• I do not want to charge people for using this site (and thus being able to pay for a webhost) because I think this kind of site should be free to use for anyone
• If I will get lots of complaints then I will consider to respond by discontinue LoneMatch

      Webmaster

New URL for Lonematch:

http://lonematch.netfirms.com/