The Road Ahead

We have implemented an update to TaxiOffice's Subscription Management System that corrects several minor issues. This includes a fix to the rare "Site Offline" bug that sometimes occurred when a TaxiOffice site was transitioning between subscription periods.

This update does not affect TaxiOffice directly and there have been no changes to individual TaxiOffice instances. It applies to the underlying system responsible for managing TaxiOffice subscriptions.

If you experience a problem or have a question about using TaxiOffice, please get in touch.

Future TaxiOffice Updates

As we are currently drawing up plans for the next version of TaxiOffice, we are looking for suggestions on how to improve TaxiOffice. This may be either new features or enhancements to existing capabilities. If you have a suggestion, please let us know via our Support Helpdesk.

We've added a couple of step-by-step support guides to our knowledgebase on how to configure http://www.emclient.com">eM Client for use with our standard email accounts.

• Configuring IMAP account in eM Client
• Configuring POP3 account in eM Client

Our standard mail accounts may be accessed by any POP or IMAP email client. If we don't already have a step-by-step guide for your favourite client*, let us know.

Following on from yesterday's post about backing up standard email accounts, we've just published a new knowledgebase article on how to backup Hosted Exchange accounts.

KB210 : Backing up Hosted Exchange Account

Some changes are afoot at Calzada Media. Some you’ll see soon with others appearing in the near future.

One of the first changes is to our free URL shortening service, LeafUrl. After careful consideration, we have decided to close LeafURL to anonymous users with immediate effect.

This does not mean LeafURL has ceased to be. Customers and registered users may continue to create and manage FREE short Urls through the customer portal. Go to My Account and then click on the LeafURL tab.

All existing shortened Urls created by registered users will continue to work. Urls created by anonymous users may be removed or pruned.

Love them or hate them - and most people hate them - CAPTCHAs are a necessity on websites nowadays. Without this Are you human? challenge, website forms like our contact us cannot detect the difference between a human visitor or an automated system.

An un-CAPTCHA'd form is a sitting target for any malicious automated system to exploit. Potential exploits range from just submitting endless junk data right through to attempting to force a security breach. CAPTCHAs don't protect against exploits, but they do significantly reduce the risk of exposure.

So this is why we use CAPTCHAs on our Contact Us, Get A Quote and other forms on the public side of our website.

Until relatively recently, we've been using an image-based CAPTCHA. This is one of the most commonly used approaches where an image is presented containing skewed and distorted text that the user has to read and then input. Technically, this works fine. From a usability perspective, it is awful. Sometimes the text was unreadable and it was next to useless on a poor screen or for the visually impaired.

So, we've replacing all the CAPTCHA with a new maths-based challenge designed and built in-house. Instead of reading warped text, you'll now need to be able to add, subtract, multiple or divide. To keep things simple, all answers are in whole numbers - there will be no need to grab a pen and pencil to perform long division. There is also no need to know you're thirteen times tables, as it only goes upto 10.

We've already deployed the Math CAPTCHA on the Contact Us and Get A Quote pages and it will be the default CAPTCHA in the next TaxiOffice update.