Friday, 5 February 2010

From Catherine Grant

As of late on February 5th, all of the situation set out below has been resolved: Film Studies For Free has been given the all-clear.

Dear Readers (subscribers and followers) of Film Studies For Free,
Unfortunately, Google has reported that 'Part of this site [Film Studies For Free] was listed for suspicious activity 2 time(s) over the past 90 days'. If you have tried to click on a link to my website in the last two days, you will most likely have come across the same warning. This has not happened before on this blog, thankfully. But it has happened now and I have acted quickly to address the problem.
I believe that this situation has arisen because several of the links in my sidebar blogrolls were to sites recently 'taken over' by malware/'badware'. I have thus deleted all relevant sidebar elements (apologies if my link to your website has disappeared as a result).
I am now applying to Google to get the 'all clear', and if this happens smoothly, I will start to reconstruct what I have removed, bit by bit, on the basis of secure linking.
If this does not immediately solve the problem, I will have to reconsider the future of this blog. In the meantime, all of the resources I have gathered together in the last 19 months are safe and seemingly 'uncontaminated' by malware.
In either case, I will publish another blogpost as soon as I can in order that those hundreds of you who subscribe to this blog in a reader can at least know what's happening without actually having to visit the blog properly - and thus risk the wrath of the warning message. I will not delete the blog without further warning.
In addition, you can keep in touch with Film Studies For Free's ongoing work of sharing links to openly-accessible film studies resources by following the FSFF 'microblog' on Twitter. You can also email me directly using this link.
My sincere apologies for any alarm caused by this situation, and thanks very much in advance for your patience.
Catherine Grant

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Catherine, I (like many others, I'm sure) greatly appreciate all the hard work you do here; you've created a truly excellent scholarly resource! I hope that the review process is swift and successful so you can return to the the 'business as usual' as one of the best and most important film blogs out there! :)

Catherine Grant said...

Thanks a lot for your support, Tama. It is very much appreciated.