Welcome back, it's been one hell of a week

Hi guys,

Yep, it's been a rough few days. The good news is that we're back and in record time I would say. I'll leave the story till later time since there are still a few more things that need sorting out.

On the plus side, our performance problems should now be fixed once and for all.

Roger Ebert - didn't realize what he was going through

I felt gutted reading this article about Roger Ebert and the cancerous tumor that he had removed and subsequent complications. For me, he has always been the best movie critic there is.

http://www.esquire.com/print-this/roger-ebert-0310

Sincere apologies for the recent spam attacks

Dear all,

This is to sincerely apologize for the recent spam attacks that have been affecting our board as well as the IPB boards of many other websites too. The attacker was able to mass PM all members with spam and, naturally, caused quite a few people to get upset.

What we have done now to temporarily combat this issue is:

• Permanently disable all new registrations. This will be an inconvenience both for new users as well as for admins, but for the time being new registrations will be frozen until we can get past this issue. Thereafter, we will look into setting up a process for selectively approving and validating new registrations. We hate to do this, since new users are without a doubt an important part of this community, but unfortunately, for the time being we feel forced to have to take this step.
• Members will not be able to use the PM system unless they get promoted to the +Members group, which happens after the member makes a certain number of posts. Members in other groups will not be affected.
• Offending user accounts have been deleted

We will lay out a long-term, permanent plan soon and keep you all posted once that's available.


I would like to personally thank and credit the following members for their vigilance, for sending in their suggestions and for always reporting offending users and posts; this website would truly not be the same without you guys: amir, bobhome, j-rah.

Special thanks goes to Thorchevron7 for taking a personal interest in fixing the issue despite not being a poster here. He could have simply ignored the issue, but instead decided to drop me a line with some tips on permanently fixing the issue.

Once again, please accept my sincere apologies. We've taken steps that we believe will mitigate the issue, but in case it persists, kindly let me or one of the mods know right away and we'll work promptly on getting to the bottom of this headache once and for all.



Regards,
Ali

Regarding the recent outages, and other news

Hi everyone,

You might have noticed that the outages have become more frequent recently. Unfortunately, I've not been able to pinpoint the culprit by looking through the server logs so what our web-host will do after midnight tonight is take the server down for approximately four hours to run a full hardware diagnostics test in order to see if the issue is related to hardware. Whatever the reason turns out to be, even if it turns out that we have to upgrade our hardware, I'll be sure to request that they do that right away.

Regarding the general activity, I admit that I've not been really active lately, and certainly appreciate all you guys who have been checking in from time to time. Unfortunately, a few things happened in my life recently that have made it difficult to be as active here as before. Things are slowly settling down now, so I should have more free time soon (not the first time that's been said ) to be an active part of this great community once again.

Thanks again, guys. I'll be sure to keep you posted.

Overcoming tragedy with amir-esque wisdom

My hard disk at work died.

Late last week, I tried to boot it and a message popped up just said that it couldn't find the hard disk and all attempts at resuscitating it proved futile. I ended up losing most (I'd kept backups of some at random points during the past two years) of my notes, bookmarks, pictures, bits of texts and quotes, papers a and articles that I'd been meaning to read, etc.

The strange thing is that after feeling bad about losing all of that data, I remembered something that amir had posted a while ago about his coworker finding an article that was oh-so great and then deciding not to save it because he knew that he would never get back to it. In a way, I felt like everything that I'd lost wasn't that big of a deal because the reality was that I didn't really remember what most of it was nor was I likely to ever find, let alone bring up, any of my hundreds of bookmarks.

So the moral of the story is to live life in as stateless a way as possible...and to take amir seriously because the guy knows a thing or two about life