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Yet another sad example of the nanny state we live in. Context has now been filed away with common sense, only to be used by someone with a City and Guilds in Political Correctness.

I tend to fine hormonal is quite a good one to use if I'm losing an argument with the wife. Always gets the desired reaction 

Hello Ina, welcome to the forums.

Well we used to have the grumpiest employee if that counts? Unfortunately his mantle has been taken by an even grumpier coffee shop owner, but our man Clive used to be Google Number 1 for Grumpy Clive

Now that's got to be worth a certificate, plus we have Jan and his humour contributions

Get deep pockets?

Hotels for sale

you assured me of client confidentiality  Now everyone knows....

I must admit, I was originally quite supportive of it. But the projected costs seem astronomical compared to any perceived benefit, the amount of disruption, and what else the money could be used for, like you say expanding Heathrow.

There is huge opposition in Warwickshire, particularly over Southam way, as the proposed line will decimate a couple of beautiful villages, and my folks have just sold up as they found out there will be a huge HS2 construction camp just down the road from their place.

In Stratford Upon Avon, for around £50 million, they could reinstate the track and reconnect Strafords station to Honeybourne, about 8 miles away, giving Stratford a direct link to London again. As a tourist town, traffic congestion gets worse year on year. I've no doubt there are loads of smaller regional projects around the country that will directly impact and help the local economy, versus this huge mammoth project that nobody seems to want.

awwwww 

Welcome back!

Can't imagine having xmas dinner at a Witherspoons, it is what it is, cheap pub grub. Think of witherspoons, I think of burgers  

Thought I'd check out what they had to say on their own website, but looks like they are behind schedule...

Whats the date? 

Welcome to the forums and what a cracking question 

Unfortunately like you, we have found over the years that not all customers are good customers!

I'm a huge fan of the 80/20 rule and you can pretty much apply it to everything, including problem customers. 20% of your customers will cause 80% of your admin and resources. Identifying this and not being scared to turn people away is a great way of freeing up overhead.

So in cases of hard work customers, perceived ongoing issues or problems, we have a variety of methods of gently turning people away. From a gentle, "this really isn't for you", to more extreme measures including a refund and/or removing and blocking from signing up or taking out a listing with us in the future.

Customer service is vital and we pride ourselves in it, but it's also a 2 way street. Some people are naturally belligerent, unrealistic or just overtly rude, nasty or life's moaners. So let them be someone else's problem.

We happily spend countless time on individual businesses helping them out, going above and beyond, as long as it's appreciated.

In your scenario, you have a long history with a customer, it sounds like a fraught relationship, makes little business sense and he has already given you a way out. "I'll take my business else where" - So let him. But be polite, stay professional and say goodbye.

If you are the only place in the UK to get your product, even better  

Consider anything you send via communication may end up cut and pasted onto a review site, or social media. So think carefully about any wording, then set up a google alert for your business name and his (or a few variations) so you will know if he does leave any negativity on reviews or social media.

But this can be easily combated by building up a positive reputation across review sites, social media sites, and adding a calm rational and factual response to any negativity. 

Hi Barney, ta for the feedback.

To say we have had some challenges is an understatement and the whole project is now scheduled to go live in November, touch wood and with a fair breeze 

Your Firefox issue though is baffling, so determined to get to the bottom of it as we can't replicate it. 

Gone through our logs and we can see plenty of visitors landing and navigating the forum using firefox browsers.

According to our Google Analytics, here are the top 50 different Firefox versions that visited the forum over the last 30 days (didn't realise there were that many versions!)

Is your firefox one of those versions? You can find your browser version by selecting the About Firefox.

The only other things we can think of, as an old time forum member, I wonder if you are landing on the forum from an old mylocalforums.com bookmark, from when the forum used to be on it's own site.

I wonder if you are you trying to connect to a https version of the old URL? eg like the image below? As this has no certificate, so will report as not secure.

Or are you landing on this URL, our non secure version of the site?

This should load without any problems, and we haven't got any reported cases of issues, but keen to know if this is the URL you are having problems with.

When the new site goes live, all URLs will become secure, and everything will be redirected to https://www.mylocalservices.co.uk

So firefox should show a secure connection, but for unlogged in users, the Google Adsense units do trigger a tracking protection alert. Is this what you are seeing?

This is an ongoing issue for lots of sites as we slide into an adblocker standards battle.

The only other thing I can think of is if you access the forum from a mobile device, which is: m.mylocalservices.co.uk

This again should currently work with or without https, but will be dropped when the new site is launched as the separate mobile site is getting axed.

So does any of that shed any light Barney?

If not, can you upload a screenshot to this post (or email us at info@mylocalservices.co.uk) so we can see exactly what the issue is.

If anyone else is viewing from a firefox browser and experiencing problems, please let us know as we are struggling to replicate the problem.

Finally, the news many SEO peeps and site owners have been waiting for, Googles infamous Penguin has finally become part of Googles core algorithm.

So no more nail biting Penguin announcements, it simply runs now in real-time, which is good news all round.

If you've no idea what it was, Penguin was the code word given to a manually run Google filter that analysed the linking profile of your website, and penalised if it deemed it to be spammy or unnatural.

Unfortunately, the filter was run infrequently, sometimes with a 12 month or longer gap, so if you made any improvements, you had a long wait to see if they had any positive affect.

That's all history now, so if you do have spammy links to a page, that page will lose visibility, but it may not impact your whole site as it did before. But as soon as you sort out the links or problems in question, then once the page has been revisited by the Google bot, in theory your page should lose any algorithm associated penalty associated with it.

The filter that checked the quality of content on a page was called Panda, and this was made part of the Google core algorithm around January this year.

You can read more about it on the Google blog: Penguin is now part of our core algorithm