We Stand With Ukraine

2 minute read time · Updated January 9, 2025
MIDAS Stands With Ukraine

As governments around the world sanction Russia and its allies, like many software vendors, we here at MIDAS HQ are appalled and horrified by recent world events. We want to play our part to show our support and solidarity with Ukraine.

As more companies and businesses take it upon themselves to withdraw their products and services from Russia, we’re doing the same.

To that end, we’ve conducted a thorough review of our business operations in light of Russia’s abhorrent invasion of Ukraine.

Reviewing our operations

As you may be aware, MIDAS is a UK based business. However, we have customers in dozens of countries across the world.

We are pleased to report that our review found that we don’t currently have any active customers in either Russia or Belarus.

Now, whilst our administration resides in the UK, much of our network infrastructure is geographically located in US. (See: Where is MIDAS based?)

However, we have no physical or virtual presence, operations, or infrastructure in Russia, Belarus, or Ukraine.

That said, our network does utilize Cloudflare, a US company who provide CDN and website security services. Cloudflare do have network infrastructure in these countries. You can read more about Cloudflare’s stance in their post: “Steps we’ve taken around Cloudflare’s services in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia“

Whilst we’re helpless to stop the atrocities in Ukraine, there are some small actions that we can take in response.

Actions we’ve taken:

  • We’ve blocked access to our website and our customer’s cloud hosted MIDAS systems from Russian and Belarusian IP addresses.
  • We’ve blocked Yandex (Russia’s equivalent to Google Search) from crawling our website.
  • We’ve halted future sales of MIDAS to organizations located in, or with close connections to, Russia and Belarus.

We believe the above measures will be widely supported by our customers. These measures will remain in place until further notice.

We stand united with the people of Ukraine. Post-war we will look to further support Ukrainian organizations and businesses rebuild their operations and get back on their feet, by offering free licenses for our MIDAS scheduling software.

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No, we’re not based in American Samoa!

2 minute read time · Updated February 10, 2025

Occasionally, folks reach out to us and ask us if we’re based in American Samoa, as our domain name ends in “.as”.

“.as” is the domain extension for the country American Samoa – knows as a Country Code Top-Level domain (or ccTLD). Every country in the world has been assigned a ccTLD. For example, “.fr” is the ccTLD belonging to France, “.au” is the ccTLD assigned to Australia, and so forth.

Typically, ccTLDs are used for individuals, organizations, and businesses based in that country. For instance, a UK-based business may choose to have a “.uk” domain name.

If MIDAS isn’t based in American Samoa, why use an “.as” domain?

We’re using a .as domain as a “domain hack“.

What is a ‘domain hack’?

Firstly, don’t worry when you see the work ‘hack’ in this context. This does not relate to computer ‘hacking’ or other such illegal activities.

A “domain hack” is simply a domain name that suggests a word, phrase or brand by combining two or more adjacent parts of the domain, which usually ends by incorporating the letters from a ccTLD to complete the word.

Here are some common Domain Hack examples:

  • goo.gl (using the .gl ccTLD of Greenland)
  • instagr.am (using the .am ccTLD of Armenia)
  • youtu.be (using the .be ccTLD of Belgium)

Because our room booking software is called “MIDAS”, we chose the domain name “mid.as”.

So where is MIDAS based?

We’re actually a British based business located in the United Kingdom.

So whenever you see a domain name ending with a ccTLD, don’t assume that the website or business is specific to the country indicated by the ccTLD.

It may well be that the business is global or located elsewhere in the world and is just using a ccTLD as a “domain hack” to form part of a word.

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MIDAS v4.29 Out Now!

2 minute read time · Updated March 12, 2024

Merry Christmas! Even though 2021 has been another challenging year for many, we hope you’ve all been able to enjoy a better Christmas this year compared to the previous one.

Over the festive period, we released a new update to MIDAS, which we’re pleased to share details of with you here on our blog.

Highlights of MIDAS v4.29 include:

How To Get MIDAS v4.29…

New Customers:

You can try MIDAS v4.29 for yourself with no obligation to purchase!

We offer both a functional public demo, as well as the opportunity for you to try MIDAS free for 30 days.

If you’ve decided that MIDAS is the right solution for your scheduling needs, then you can securely purchase online here.

“Self Hosted” Customers:

Self-Hosted customers with active Support Subscriptions will shortly be able to update to v4.29. It only takes a couple of clicks – simply log in to your MIDAS system and go to MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Update.

If no update is available, please check back again in a few days time, as we are staggering updates for self-hosted customers over the next few weeks.

“Cloud Hosted” Customers:

Cloud-Hosted customers don’t need to do anything! – All our active Cloud-Hosted MIDAS customers have been automatically updated to this latest version of MIDAS.

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Specify an alternate “reply to” email address

2 minute read time · Updated December 9, 2021

As you can probably guess, a room booking system needs to be able to send email notifications. These may include, for instance, booking confirmation emails sent to customers.

MIDAS is no exception, and an extensive range of email settings and options are available in the software. Administrative users may configure these via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Email.

One of the available email settings allows you to have email notifications sent from your MIDAS system to be sent from a particular email address.

Typically, for automated emails that you don’t require a response to, you may specify a “no-reply” style address.

However, what if you want to provide a way for your customers to contact you should they have any queries?

Well, you could use a real email address instead of a no-reply “black hole” inbox which isn’t monitored.

Or, from MIDAS v4.29 onwards, you could instead specify a “Reply To” email address. This can be different from the address that emails from your MIDAS system are sent from.

Specifying a "reply to" email address
Specifying an alternate “reply to” email address

In the above example screenshot, all email sent from the MIDAS system will be sent as though it originated from the address “[email protected]”.

However, if a recipient of an email from this MIDAS system hits “Reply”, they’ll be composing a message that will be sent to “[email protected]” (instead of “[email protected]”.

This new setting adds a standard “Reply-To” header to all outgoing email from your MIDAS system.

More information on the various email configuration options and settings in MIDAS may be found in the documentation.

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