You may be wondering, “When is Ate Up With Motor going to stop messing around and provide some actual new content?” This is a fine question and you’ll find an answer of sorts below.
Continue Reading A Status Report

At the risk of further trying everyone’s patience while waiting for new content, I am pained to announce yet further tinkering with the Privacy Policy to better reflect the current range of embedded content. The reason I keep making these announcements is that the policy as written called for me to announce “material” changes (not counting my fussing with minor details like fixing typographical mistakes). To reduce the amount of policy-related posts, I have added a new Policy Update Minder to the right sidebar, which will show the effective dates of the current versions of the policies so you can review any changes at your convenience. I will now do this instead of taking up a lot of real estate with posts about it (although I may still announce something that constitutes a really big change).

For various reasons, there has been a dearth of new content in recent months, although I spent a while making a lot of housekeeping changes to older articles, fixing factual errors, and the like, and I am still working on the update of the Dynaflow/later Hydra-Matic article that will likely be the next major article. (As with the first part of the Hydra-Matic article, I have been going through a lot of technical documents and patent literature to get the workings of these things straight, which is complicated by there being so many different transmissions.)

I realize that it is frustrating for regular readers, but I recognize that I get a lot of “long-tail” traffic of people coming to articles months or years after the fact, and I’ve had the unhappy experience before of seeing other people innocently repeat factual errors I’ve made, which is part of why I get caught up in trying to get it right. I know this flies in the face of the “hit post and move on” philosophy of most web content, however, so I appreciate your patience, however strained!

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be experimenting with some new anti-spam tactics. My existing solution, which had been working pretty well, now has some serious shortcomings following the most recent update to the content management system, so I’m going to need to try something different. (I get hundreds of obvious spam comments every day and having my email inbox flooded with spam comment notifications every few minutes is not fun!)

Since I’m going to have to resort to a certain amount of trial and error, there may be some oddities with commenting or the forms. If you have problems or encounter something strange when leaving a comment or submitting a form, please let me know. I’m very concerned that spam prevention not present an irritation or accessibility problem for my sapient readers.

Going along with this, I decided it would be prudent to clarify some of the language in the comments and contact forms sections of the Privacy Policy. The gist is unchanged (that the website may use information associated with your comment or form submission — some of which is or could potentially be personally identifiable — to confirm that you’re a human user and not some kind of bot or automated script), but I wanted to make clear that the website may conduct those tests in a variety of different ways. (At present, I’m not sure what the final method(s) may end up being.) ETA: For your convenience, the Privacy Policy now has a recent revision log, too.

I want to ask again that people please not hotlink to images hosted on Ate Up With Motor. (To be clear, by “hotlinking,” I mean placing an image on an external website whose href attribute still refers back to the image location on the Ate Up With Motor site.) Ate Up With Motor runs on a shared server with finite resources; hotlinking images adds to the load on the server and makes it that much more difficult for me to keep the site running at a reasonable speed. For that reason, if I see evidence of hotlinking in the server or error logs, I may take technical steps to block it. (I’ve added a specific stipulation to the Privacy Policy to that effect.) Thanks for understanding!

ETA: I want to draw a clear distinction here between hotlinking images and simply reusing them in some other manner, stipulations for which are discussed in the Reprint/Reuse Policy. If, for example, an image is in the public domain in your jurisdiction, you’re certainly welcome to copy the image and reuse it elsewhere on the web — just don’t expect me to host it for you (which is what hotlinking entails) without asking me first!

I have made several minor additions to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for the site. Specifically, I updated the Privacy Policy to make more explicit that this site, its host, and its analytics service are all based in the U.S. and to fix some awkward wording. (ETA: I also clarified that the conditions listed under Disclosure of Personally Identifying Information are separated by “and/or.”) I updated the Terms to add a clearer Contact Form and Email Communication Policy, which is now linked from the contact forms. Please be sure to read them and let me know if you have any questions or comments.

I have made several substantive additions to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for the site. Please be sure to read them and let me know if you have any questions or comments.

I’ve updated the site’s Reprint/Reuse Policy (which is now linked in the Administrative Pages menu on the right for ease of reference) and I encourage everyone to read it. The policy is not significantly different than it has been, but I’ve reformatted it to make it easier to read and to clarify a few points.

As with all of the site’s policies, I’ve tried very hard to balance what I reasonably need to do to protect myself and my rights with an appropriate respect for common sense and the principles of fair use. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

ETA (Jan. 13, 2016): I have made a further update to the policy — including reorganizing and reformatting parts of it — in the interests of clarity, avoiding inadvertent contradictions, and trying to balance a bunch of conflicting priorities. I encourage you to read the updated policy if you’re interested in excerpting an article, reusing photos, or anything like that, and to let me know if you have questions or concerns. My intent is not to be scary or unduly restrictive while covering myself and the people who are kind enough to let me use their photos and other material.

I have made several substantive additions to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for the site, adding three important points:
Continue Reading Policy Update