Over the last few days, a new outage reporting system has been introduced. We recommend that users of the service use the reporting system if a server is down or shows a MySQL error, as it sends us all of the relevant information which is required for us to fix the problem quickly.

Some people may have noticed that the secure pages of our website at secure.bellonline.co.uk were partially encrypted for a few days. This was due to two images linking to a non-https location inside a javascript file after a website update.

This has now been fixed so you should find that https pages are serving fully encrypted content with no errors.

This does not affect paying customers of any of our services.

It has become very time consuming to offer live support to users on the free service, so we no longer offer live support for FreeStreamHosting users. The main problem has been that users of this service rarely read the FAQ before getting in touch and tend to ask questions that are covered, there is also the problem of a lot of people signing up that don’t know how to use shoutcast and I am spending a lot of time explaining how to stream (often to people that don’t have a good grasp of English which makes things 10 times harder).

There will also be some changes to the way that general support enquiries are handled. Any tickets received asking questions that are answered in the FAQ will be rejected without notice. The same goes for those that don’t contain the required information (stream URL).

From now on, we only accept support requests from FreeStreamHosting users from http://secure.bellonline.co.uk/submitticket-fsh.php

After getting a lot of requests from customers and freestreamhosting users for a flash player that doesn’t display listener stats, I’ve changed the player to FFMP3. This has been changed on all up to date links so if your player hasn’t changed then please log in to the control panel and check that you’re using the correct link/code to display it.

Here’s an example http://shoutcast.mixstream.net/flash/uk2-pn:8740

I’ll be adding the ability to disable auto-start at some point as well, this is something else that people have been requesting.

There is a minor glitch with the directory and toolbar which is resulting in stations being listed multiple times. This will be fixed soon, I have an idea of what’s causing it.

The StationFinder.org toolbar has been updated, and now includes more radio streams, better searching option and more genres to choose from.

You can download the toolbar completely free of charge from http://stationfinder.ourtoolbar.com/

Any comments or suggestions are very welcome, please submit and feedback or requests at http://stationfinder.org/toolbar/feedback.php – please note that although we do appreciate all feedback, you will not get a personal reply if you don’t include your email address – no personal data is submitted with the form.

The toolbar is and will remain an ongoing project.

The customer directory at stationfinder.org has been revamped. It now includes freestreamhosting customers and I’m considering putting a form on there so anyone can submit their stream.

The s2 server on our free shoutcast service seems to have died and we can’t reboot is properly. The data has been recovered and it will be installed over the next few hours.

UPDATE (19:57): Working now.