General Notes about this Website

No deep linking!

All pages, images and other files on this site are COPYRIGHT, and posting of images from this site on other sites without my express permission is forbidden, as is deep linking to pictures or other non-page files on this site. On the other hand, links to any pages on this site are, of course, welcome.

As on my other sites, I do what I can to prevent or at least discourage deep linking (i.e., direct links) to image / graphics files on this site. It's highly unsociable to deep link to files other than web pages on a site without express permission to do so (bandwidth theft and copyright infringement), and I note that the most common source of deep links to images on my sites has been forums, where irresponsible people are happy to steal bandwidth from my sites and of course to infringe copyright as though there were no tomorrow.

Deep linking to images on any of my sites is extremely pointless, because I quickly discover it through daily examination of my detailed website statistics, and these latter reveal to me the address of the web page with the offending picture link so that I can take targeted action against that link or indeed that site, blocking further accesses to that image from that site — and I reserve the right, in particular cases, to substitute an 'Image blocked' image carrying an incriminating message, to display on that page. I could of course substitute something offensive (be warned!), but in practice that is something I wouldn't do.

In case you fall into one of my bot traps…

Robots (i.e., Web ones) are programs that automatically surf the Web collecting email addresses for the purpose of sending them spam, or stealing ('scraping') copyright material with the aim of misusing it for the gain of miscreants and criminals, or various types of hacking of or other interference with the operation of the target websites. Many of these deliberately access pages that are forbidden for all robots. For example, one from Poland that showed up in the relevant logfile for my site read the robots exclusion list, evidently saw that the Visitors' Book pages were forbidden, and went straight for those particular pages and no others at all.

There's a trap for bad bots at the top of each of my web pages as part of my ongoing programme of progressively excluding from this site all unwelcome robots that I can detect. Nowadays that's an invisible feature that nobody can click on, but it might catch the odd individual who attempts to use a whole-site downloader (not recommended!).

Privacy Policy

My five websites all respect your privacy, and don't track you. Indeed, no cookies are used at all, and no 'spying' techniques such as web bugs are used. I do carry out a check of my daily website statistics, but these don't show visitors' personal information apart from certain technical details — their host or IP address, their browser, their operating system, and usually any search text that they have used in order to find the particular page they have requested. That is standard data supplied by any hosting company.

The forms that I use for contact, visitors' book entry, or making a photo purchase enquiry do ask for your email address, but I guarantee that those addresses and any other personal information that you may supply (such as postal address, required for some purposes) won't be passed on to any third parties, nor placed in public view — except in the very unlikely event of it being required in the course of a criminal investigation or legal proceedings, or indeed serious misconduct of a particular site visitor.

I also give assurance that I'm very proactive with regard to security on my computer, and I have still not had one instance of my computer being infected or compromised by any 'virus' or hacking attempt, since starting with my first computer (1986 or 87); I first went online in late 1997. Thus so far I have a spotless track record with regard to keeping my data secure.