Back from the brink...

As some readers will know, Film Studies For Free had a recent brush with digital oblivion as Google fleetingly tarnished its (avowedly) sterling reputation with an access warning to those clicking on links to this site over the last two days.

A link or two in its sidebar blogrolls to legitimate websites recently affected by malware turned out to be at fault. In the meantime, FSFF practised a slash and burn technique, and became the lean-mean-blogging machine that you see before you today, that is if you glance to the right and wonder where all its links went...

The radical approach worked and, this morning, this tired and tremulous blog awoke to the good news that the very venerable Google (e-Zeus, as FSFF sometimes dares to call it) no longer considers it to be a plague house.

We live to blog another day. Phew. Thanks so much to all of you who sent supportive messages - they were very much appreciated, and will be treasured long after recent, nasty, memories have faded.

There are gonna be some changes around here, however.... So, please consider this site to be 'under (re)construction' for the next little while, as a relieved and grateful FSFF considers some layout changes, along with re-installs of and updates to its lists of permanently viewable links.

If you get tired of waiting, in the meantime, for news of fabulous, openly accessible, online film and media studies resources, just follow (or visit) FSFF's micro-blogging little sister filmstudiesff on Twitter.

Hasta la vista and thanks for your patience!

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