Why a request is not answered
Mailing problems:
Your local service provider might reject email from
(((loading@)holt.).oso).chalmers.se . Contact your administrator!
If you send requests using email, your local service provider might
not relay it to our site. Contact your administrator! Or you had
misspelled our address.
We keep a blacklist of senders by domain and mail address. For
good reason our site won't notify the sender. If you wish to contest
suspected blacklisting, please contact hgs_kanelbulle_chalmers.se
Filling out the site form:
There is a long list of issues. A couple of them relate to measures
fending off spams and hacks and your job might have implied or
created a pattern that looked like an untoward request.
The strict column format is shown together with an instructive
comment inside the form window. If a site is not within 10 km from
the earth's surface, a warning is issued already at the http stage.
Blank space is required for filling, not tabs. It must be the
character ASCII 32 decimal, 20 hex, usually generated by the space
bar on your keyboard. If characters above ASC 127 (dec) or hex-coded
characters appear, the request is termed SPAM. Reason: Abusers send
mail directly to the services email address with form elements
copied from the home page but instead of sites they enter rubbish
like text, links, photos, typically with a lot of hex-translations
when mailto.cgi (our extended version) processes it. That stuff goes
straight into /dev/null. The sender addresses are blacklisted.
A common field element that spammers simply copy is the default
value of the (ocean tide) model, DFLT. Such doesn't exist. It's
simply a trap. A request for model DFLT goes the same way as above.
However, the DFLT model can have been selected in an otherwise
perfect request. Soon there will be extended parsing so that the
sender receives an e-mail asking to resend the request for one of
the legal models. This will be the only circumstance on which the
system will contact a sender.
The service dismisses request that are in UNICODE, UTF8, or contain
html markup. If you send your requests by e-mail to loading_kanelbulle_holt.oso.chalmers.se,
make sure the mail composer produces only bare and plain ASCII, no
markups.
Site names may contain alphanumeric characters plus a few others
(sorry, we should give a list of permissible symbols here), but
accented characters must be avoided. Some problematic characters are
rejected at the http-page with the unspecific message "garbled". For
instance, a slash `/ ยด is not allowed. Spaces are discouraged as
they are interpreted to separate site name and monument code. Two
separate spaces (like in "Bar Le Duc"), and the loading calculation
runs havoc! Use a contiguous set of spaces to delimit a site name
and its IERS monument code, if it has one at all.
Preliminarily:
Legitimate are \ " ' - _ ? &
Illegitimate are / $
Untested yet: : ; . = ( ) [ ] { } !