• Alert/error codes and actions

Your control page consists of a menu bar on the left, and page sections on the right. Each page section shows the page address at the top, followed by patrol details, and has four red control buttons at the bottom. If you have several patrolled pages, there is a section for each page, each with it's own control buttons. You may need to scroll downwards to see all the sections.

• Update the reference checksum?
• Stop and start patrolling?
• View or download the patrol Log?
• Change the page that is patrolled?
• Stop spurious REDIRECT alerts?
• Stop dynamic content causing false alarms?
• Schedule a regular outage?
• Change the patrol frequency?
• Add, delete and change alert email address?
• Change the account name, email, user ID or password?
• Add a new page to be patrolled?

• DEFACED: Your web site has been defaced or changed in some way. If it has been hacked, restore your original page - you should have backup copies readily available and a practised restoration process to minimise the outage. If Page Patrol has detected a valid change, log on to your control page and update the checksum. If there is no discernable change, view the source of your page - there may be differences inside tags that are causing false alarms. For more details, see How do I stop dynamic content causing false alarms?.
• DNS ERR: Page Patrol could not resolve your domain name. Check your domain name servers are working correctly, your domain name subscription is up to date, and that your TLD (top level domain) settings have not been changed.
• NO CONN: Could not make a TCP/IP connection to your server. Check your server hardware, operating system and internet connection.
• REFUSED: The server refused a connection. This is a symptom of overloading or a denial-of-service attack.
• NO RESP: We could connect to your server, but the there was no response to our HTTP request. This is likely to be a problem with the web server software rather than hardware or operating system, and may be a symptom of overloading or a denial-of-service attack.
• ERR xxx: The web server returned error code xxx. Check your web server.
• REDIRCT: Your page has been redirected to another location. Find out why, and if neccessary log on to Page Patrol and change the page address to the new location.

When you make changes to your website, you need to update the reference checksum to prevent Page Patrol issuing spurious alerts. Simply click on the red "New Checksum" button at the bottom of the section for the page that has changed. The checksum date will change to "Next Patrol" until the next patrol takes the new checksum.

If you need to stop Page Patrol checking your web site, click on the red "Stop Patrol" button at the bottom of the section for the page that has changed. A "STOPPED" label will appear and the "Stop Patrol" button will be replaced with a "Start Patrol" button. Click this to start patrolling again.

You can view details of all visits Page Patrol has made to your site. When you click on the red "View Patrol Log" button, all visits for the current day will be displayed in reverse order (latest visit first). To view other days, select the date, whether you want alerts only or all visits, and which order to show the the visits in - then click the "Submit" button.

Click "Download Log" from the menu on your control page, and select the web page(s) and range of dates. When you click the "Submit" button, the log data will be downloaded in comma-separated-value (csv) format. You can either save this to your hard drive or open it directly with Excel.

Clicking on the red "Page Settings" button will open a form with all the settings specific to that page. Simply edit the "Web Page Address" field, and click the "Submit" button. Changing the address will automatically update the reference checksum.

Spurious REDIRECT alerts can be caused by your webserver redirecting requests for "www.yoursite.com" to another page, like "www.yoursite.com/index.html". To find the redirect address, type your address into your browser and see if it changes when you hit "Enter". If so, change the page address to the second (redirected) address.

Some web pages have "dynamic content", things that may change between visits. You may display the time or date, or a visitor count, for instance. If your site includes banner ads, these may have different identifiers each time they load. To stop dynamic content triggering defacment alerts, you can tell Page Patrol to ignore certain elements of your web page - click on the red "Page Settings" button and select what you want ignored, then click "Submit".

• Day and month names: Page Patrol will ignore any day or month name, and any three letter abbreviation, so "Monday" and "NOV" will not be included in the checksum. With this option, you probably want to ignore digits too.
• Digits: The characters 0 to 9 are ignored.
• Tag Contents: All characters inside the tag < and > symbols are left out of the checksum. This fixes most false alarms caused by banner ads.
• Everything: No checksum is taken, so there is no defacement detection.

<!--ppi--> This is ignored <!--/ppi-->

If your website is unavailable at regular times, you can prevent alerts by setting scheduled outages. Page Patrol will not patrol during these periods. Click the red "Page Settings" button, then edit the "Add New Outage Start" and "Stop" day and time fields, and click "Submit". Remove existing outages by clicking the "Delete" link by the outage you don't want.

You can change how often your site is patrolled by clicking the red "Page Settings" button on your control page. The current interval between patrols is shown in the "Patrol Frequency" section, along with the current expiry date for this page.

Because Page Patrol charges depend on the patrol frequency, we need to compensate when you change this setting. If you choose a shorter patrol interval, you are getting a better service than you paid for, so we bring the expiry date forward in proportion to the cost difference. Conversely if you switch to longer patrols you are getting less than you paid for, and we extend the expiry date.

This process is completely reversible, so you can increase patrols for a short period (for instance after installing a new server) and then revert to your normal frequency when you are sure it is stable.

You can carry out all of these functions by clicking on the red "Page Settings" button.

To add an address, type it into the "New Addresses" field, select a message type and click the "Submit" button. Repeat this process to add more addresses if necessary.

To delete addresses, simply click on the "Delete" link by the address you want to remove.

To change an address, first delete the old version, then add the new one.

To change a message type, just click it - it will change to the other type.

• A normal alert message gives a full description of the error and suggests remedial action.
• A short alert message gives only the error code and the web page address, suitable for mobile phones and text pagers.

Click on the "Account Settings" item on the left hand menu bar. Make any changes to the existing settings, and click "Submit". Note that the password fields are shown blank - if you leave them empty, your existing password will remain unchanged.

Click on the "New Page" item on the left hand menu bar. Fill in the page details, and click "Submit".