Flame Warriors ~ View topic

I'm the last human being left on all the fora, aren't I?
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
forwarding.station.trottam@gmail.com

Yeah, humans and bots have dropped off somewhat.

A bit belated, but ...

Happy New Year.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

Yeah, merry whatevermas and happy new year and blah blah blah.

We might as well not even come here any more if we're the only two left. There are easier ways to make mindless chatter, like using e-mails and/or IMs. Or one of us could hop over to another, far more active site the other's already part of.

It's sad that this site had to die like it did, honestly. I think I'll miss irritus the most. Cheesus was pretty good too, until he went crazy and deleted a bunch of crap. But it's gone now, and there's not anything much we can do about it any more except maybe save the important parts for legacy purposes.
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
forwarding.station.trottam@gmail.com

Well despite the difficulty for some people to register, and common proxies are burned, I'm surprised we get any new visitors. But we do get a few legitimate members now and then, however if they don't post, they unfortunately are likely to get wiped.

If a forum, when it's hacked or taken down by a mad nothing piece of crap, can't be restored, then what effectively will follow will be exactly what happened in the Yahoo saga back in the mid 90s.

The only thing that can avert imminent collapse, is if the forum undergoes a change or changes to enhance participation.

I'd also blame better company net security for a general drop off of surfers engaging in forums and visiting sites like Flame Warriors.

The new hand held touch screen thingies don't exactly endear themselves to serious forum participation either.

Anyhow:

Mike for whatever reason isn't in a hurry to change anything. Maybe the forum has served its purpose for the moment.

Now spam seems to be not such a task here anymore, I can seriously get back to thinking about creating another forum. The biggest issue is where to host. Given recent events the US is now definitely out of my list, pity because there were some bargains to be had. .
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

SOPA and PIPA? Don't worry about that. The G-men are going to learn their place as public servants. It's really just a matter of how wild the ride will be at this point.

As for everything else... okay, i guess.
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
forwarding.station.trottam@gmail.com

It's not the G men, it's the music movie industry which runs the show. They've just been patiently waiting for the law to change.

ie, bye bye youtube as it's known. Half the file sharing places, and expect the torent sites to go down if they are hosted in a US friendly country.

I believe in fair play. There should be an archive of low bit rate but perfectly radio quality mp3s of for every song / mix ever made, that is free for the world, not just certain states or countries. Most of the need to copy would quickly dissipate.

Oh yeah, it should be compulsory for the Movie /TV industry to host a permanent page for the music / sound samples (anti weasel term) used in their movies and TV shows, and consequently different DVD music as well. If not commercially available, the public would have to content with the radio quality mp3 in the free archive.

We all moved form vinyl to cds for the better quality, and supposedly because it would allow the music industry to drop their prices. What a load that was. Now the music and movie industry is not just concerned with high definition, but mediocre quality ... honestly ... they're trying to sell low quality as well now. Geez, that was once the domain of enthusiasts who had to put up with their taped music tv shows and movies, until they could afford to purchase what their heart desired most.

They've been (music and movie) ever since trying to figure a way around what the computer industry leaned in the 80's, if in the end it involves the viewer watching or seeing something, the data can be duplicated close to perfect for viewing and listening pleasure.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

It really doesn't matter who's "pulling the strings," as the saying goes. If the general public pushes deep enough, they'll find the damned Illuminati or some equivalent if it even exists. And if they're mad enough, they'll cause some big problems for who- or whatever is the root of their annoyance. The same is true of apathy: If people don't take action against some entity trying to slowly but surely force hell upon them, as the conspiracy theorists like to believe is happening even now, -- an indeed any nuisance laws, as governments often do now -- then it doesn't really matter what the entity is that's doing it, only that they'll succeed unless they randomly decide against it or a stronger power rises up.
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
forwarding.station.trottam@gmail.com

Of course it matters. If one lashes out aimlessly, rather than focusing their efforts to impart a fair play policy onto the greedy ones, pretty much they'll be nothing but a bunch of hand sitting, by the powers that be.

Greed has been welcomed, pandered even, as it slowly seeped it's way through the free web. It takes on the appearance of a lengthy carefully orchestrated campaign over the years, as the general public has been manipulated with various concepts but I don't think it's the case.

Understandably much of the porn web industry has made a lot of money over the years, and yes, they apparently don't mind scraping the bottom of the barrel to do it. It's my guess that other "industries" thought they could equally expect to enact the same sort of game plan.

eg the pdf market, it's like, who cares now, I don't even bother with abstracts anymore, and I'm guessing there's plenty like myself. Thankfully papers, studies, are generally published physically, and certain libraries have a good collection.

As to SOPA and PIPA ... it would be totally unnecessary if low bite rate (but acceptable quality) archives were compulsory and free to the public. However these same industries don't want to miss out on the listening royalties or advertising profits. Greed is a funny thing.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

No, what I mean is this: It doesn't matter in that if the people push hard enough, they'll find and stop whoever it is that's behind this. It might take longer if it's less obvious, but persistence trumps any shelter or cloak you can make later if not sooner.
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
forwarding.station.trottam@gmail.com

Oh right. Gotcha. That's true but there has been resistance to the mindset of the movie and radio industry for quite some time. It's been a losing battle as far as I can tell. When the music industry first became concerned with mp3s and the technological age, the first thing to happen, a side issue, was monitoring of Radio stations to ensure the correct royalties were paid. Some tracks attract very HIGH royalty fees, so much so, that suddenly some music wasn't played at all anymore.

Eg, Red Hot Chili Peppers tracks used to flood out a lot of other good music, but they too were mighty concerned with the loss of royalties, and suddenly ... in the last 10 - 15 years in my parts, I've never heard any of their tracks played on radio or TV and for the most part they seem forgotten about. Smile

Great because I wasn't a fan, though it's not as bad as most Heavy Metal with some guy grinding out vocals in manner it's hard to distinguish from a motor that wasn't running right. In fact I laughed when I recently saw a book that had been published to try and remind the public they existed, then for the first time, I've heard a couple of their tracks played on a TV music channel. I say, too funny, but there are a number of nice groups who suddenly disappeared due to their high royalty fees. I guess it's the DJs making their point about the stupidity of overpricing something.

In the process of persistence, it has to be emphasised to the movie and music industry until they come to terms that - not every child or adult has a million bucks at their disposal to buy every bit of crap they put out. They want to count every download like it's a loss of revenue, (even mediocre bit rates) but I'd expect much is downloaded, and is something they'd never buy.

The talent is out there, but what gets marketed instead, is the dribble executives and the like are sure is worth promoting and hyping up until the general public are swayed and buy into it reluctantly, in the event nothing else better is out there. Everything old is new again might hold for the fashion industry, but for the movie and tv industry, it's more like - Everything old is new again for suckers and the like. I'm tired of watching "new" movies which only re-hash some old movie plat, usually done so in a dumbed down fashion.

In my parts, prime time variety shows and the like dried up at the end of the 70s displaced by shows with content. A couple of years ago with the economic downturn, due to the cheapness of variety type shows I could see how they were being more and more hyped up to the general public as a suitable prime time viewing event once again. If people weren't already sick of reality tv type stuff, now viewing is cluttered with hopefuls who are trying to sing and dance their way to stardom. Two nights a week might be acceptable, but every night ... I'm enjoying the summer break no rating period with old real tv once again.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

Well, from what I can tell it's a bit different here in Eagle-land. Some basic principles apply here just like they do there, though. Mostly because, well, corporate high-ups are mainly Mammon worshipers, I guess. Those are the sorts that always use their advantages to make sure they're high and everyone else is low. At least in a good capitalist-leaning (Let's not go full capitalist mode like Somalia, though. [That's the one I'm thinking of right?]) society there tends to be too much competition for a massive all-consuming mega-corp to suck everything up, and even the ones that get rather big circulate cash well enough. I'm pretty sure small business still shuffles around the majority of the money and HR and such here, though. Not that that matters in the cloudy eyes of politicians because the big players are the only ones tall enough to whisper in their ears. The small businesspeople can surely try, but even if they actually hear them they'll care about as much as you would care about a three-year-old saying some ridiculousness about a pointless secret of some sort in your ear.

ETA: Also, I hear there's a third bill that's not being talked about as much. I'm not in the mood to look into it in much detail right now, so I'll just crosspost this seeing as SG is so nice as to blabber endlessly against this sort of stuff:

OMG! Yet another bill ... and one that's just nuts.

Yeah I'm aware "they've" tried to bring in a few laws regarding ISPs here as well. There's some pretty brainless people out there, who simply don't know exactly what it would require to implement and how it would really affect the internet.

However, My ISP would record I constantly visit some site. Packet sniffing the data between my computer and this site would reveal they don't always use Sony's patented Plain Text Encryption. Laughing

The problem of course with encryption is that ALL of the data would need to be saved to make sense of it at a later stage. Though there are laws against using encrypters that NSA and the like don't have a back door into, I can guarantee they do exist.

About the only other hiccup for normal users, would be when they visited sites that had their own security encrypted web page such as bank web sites. What on earth would the ISP be recording apart form the fact they visited a secure site.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

According to my understanding, encryption usually doesn't work very well for one simple reason, and that reason is that it usually includes at least one of the communicating machines saying something to this effect:

"Herpa derp, here, have my encryption key. Lemme transmit it through the internet completely unencrypted so you and everything the signal passes through can read it and read everything I send that uses that key and tell all their friends how to use it too. Hurr."

And then the other one tends to respond:

"Okay, got it. Nope, I totally don't see a problem with this easily cracked and hare-brained system because I'm a computer that's maybe as smart as a mouse if I'm lucky and designed and programmed by moronic monkeys based on methods that haven't been overhauled from the ground up like they should be in what amounts to ages in the very world my kind started. Herpy derpy derp durr."

Throw tons of programming language and math and computer semantics and such on top of that, and you get what actually happens, (Or what I know to happen, at least; there's always a chance that what I hear could be completely wrong.) but that's the abridged version. With this, you'd basically have to hack the entire internet's infrastructure, both hard and soft, to be able to transmit most anything over it in a way that would take the G-men more than maybe a couple of days to crack, unless you make your own private server and create a unique way to access that server that doesn't do such stupid things. In the latter case, it would only work with that specific server and nowhere else except for perhaps other similar servers if somebody else has the same idea. (I think that's technically what intranets are, but I'm not entirely sure.)
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
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I think you might be thinking of public key encryption. That's pretty much the problem with it, NSA and the like have the Keys, but most of us aren't doing anything wrong, so it's not like average Joe or Jill should worry.

However, the ISPs aren't going to have this permission, so they would need to save the complete data stream, if they were to "keep records" for 18 months.

I an many others use proxies, so if the law were implemented, the ISP would be recording a lot of useless information if the user doesn't want anyone to know where they visit.

Over the years web proxies have been slowly pushed into something which isn't really isn't offering much protection.

It's somewhat redundant as I'd assume the G men can easily subpoena the relevant bank or site if it was within the US or has a treaty with a country outside the States.

If in bill is indeed in the name of Child (pre pubescent) Porn, there aren't very many countries that wouldn't (I doubt any would refuse) be also keen to rip apart the records of an offending web site or non co-operative bank to retrieve the necessary data.

Obviously this is more about getting the ISP to track data which is less likely to travel through a proxy.

About the only thing for sure that would be recorded would be http or ftp downloads, as few people use a proxy to retrieve such data. Yeah, it sort of sticks out like a sore thumb doesn't it.

I'd guess the next angle would be that the new bill being proposed would be for anti terrorism, being able to track individuals and what they buy from ebay and other hardware sites.

Of course the real nightmare for ISPs begins when they have to start recording all the dynamic Ips from a P2P connection or other multiple IP hosted file. I'm not sure if Tor always connect to a more or less static but not always constant hub in a session like Sharezara, but as Tor was designed for complete anonymity I'm thinking it probably isn't. Originally I think Tor had a weakness where the nearest hub to an individual's machine remained static and it in turn was vulnerable to packet sniffing.

I think it's a case, that if you communicate using encryption which is too strong, it contravenes some law.
Ah http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_cryptography#Legal_issues

As to having to keys and such, programs that could be used ... that assumes it has to be transmitted over the web. I haven't really looked about the web the last few years while I've been chronically sick, but years ago when typical p2p wasn't finding what I needed, I was looking around for something else, torrent didn't sort of cut it, and yes, finally I found a couple of different protocols that might have ideal, except participation in both required heavy bandwidth resources.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

Well I'm really out of things to say on that note. It's not really like us rambling to no end makes a real difference in global politics anyway. But on a more personal note:

Did you register as a "Lord Wasteland" on VX? Just seems like you, and I know you've lurked about there before. My assumption that it's you is also helped by the fact that few humans actually register there, of those few, fewer post due to the 90/9/1 principle, and of those fewer, still fewer can type well like both of you (Or just you, as the case may be.) do, as is the fate of a crappy flash game site. (Luckily they normally get banned there, because of it somehow attracting more intelligent core users who run the fools off.)
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
forwarding.station.trottam@gmail.com

I haven't registered there at all, and I've not even read those threads yet. I did though read through Showgirl's interesting thread at the other forum.

I tried searching for Lard Wasteland and the site name, and I don't see any results.

Perhaps they comment in a hidden area, unless they just registered. Looking though a few of the more recent threads, I still don't see any comments by Lord wasteland.

Anyhow, be assured it's not me.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

Your lurk-fu skills seem rather impressive. But it's Lord, not Lard. Unless you were making fun of him for no adequately explored reason and noticed the O. There definitely aren't any hidden fora on either of the sites, save for the staff fora, which you could actually access rather easily if you bothered, seeing as their dinky server isn't secure by any good measure.

Fun fact: I've almost figured out how to trick the systems and guest-post on both of those sites, despite the fact that nobody is meant to be able to on either. Using mostly crappy but simple tools, a "Does this work? Well, I'll try it. Nope, doesn't work" (With the occasional "OH GODS WHAT DID I DO!?") method and back-door protocols, with very little "leet haxxor skill," no less. I actually tried it on this site, too, but it seems that irritus or Mike or someone gutted and/or rebuilt a lot of insecure things. Which is probably why we survived this long, (Well, the site did; the members are rather... gone.) though with countless recoverable crashes and such. There are a few trolls as smart as I am that would probably bother to smash the server even now if they could. I'm not sure how one would see the sanity in "killing" what's already pretty much a corpse, but it's been attempted.
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
forwarding.station.trottam@gmail.com

Ha, a Freudian slip - I was at the time, thinking of some other "lard," but not the word however. Funny how the mind works. Smile

OK, I found the guy. One post ... which explains my difficulty finding them. From that one post - you think it could be me Laughing

Transference is too funny. Smile

Ah the site staff did an upgrade a long time ago after the 2005 hack. It's enough to stop amateurish non phpbb experts hacking the site. However, like you, I feel it's the fact the place is pretty dead and hasn't been that interesting since some of it got deleted.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

Well, yeah. Squishy, moist, gray hoomin brains are weird. And I placed it around 15% chance, which is significantly higher than most of my "conspiracy theories" get. Seeing as you'd probably be nice enough to tell me I thought, well, why not. (Even if you're lying about it for some reason I trust you enough to dismiss it.)

Aaanyway, y'know, I've been pondering, and I wonder... what exactly we could do to bring in a second generation around here. You could be the father of a new age of FW if you put forth the effort. I'd probably be the mother, because, well, I figure I'm more girly than you are. I'm pretty sure I'm starting to think much like an advanced machine at this point, too, so it'd almost work in the "genius creates robot with intentions of it being like his daughter, fantastic sexless incest-like relationship ensues, they forge a new age of something or other" idea. (Think: Cave Johnson and his robot assistant in Portal 2, if you know the full story of that, or at least enough to figure out how it's somewhat parallel, though more idealistic.) Except you didn't create me and it's even more ridiculous.

We'd just need to find more members of the audience we both want and can get. Far as I can tell, that boils down to: intelligent, cynical, and varying levels of angry between "Rip their head off and crap down their neck over and over, savoring every moment" and "Eh, don't care enough to be mad" as necessary. (But only rarely very close to the former end as observable simply because most threats aren't very threatening or even all that annoying.) We might even be able to get the titans to come back. Some of them, at least. We could carve out a little forum ecosystem again. While the wait for antagonistic users was going on, I could poke and prod and be mildly annoying to damn near insufferable for the sake of stirring up the necessary amount of chaos and resulting discussion, (Read: Dramar and flamm warz of varying levels of intensity.) for sure.

*suddenly goes horribly out of character and develops a bad case of momentary anime saccharine bubbliness* Oh, it'll be just wonderful, dear!

*hack, cough, ahem, ahum* So, whaddya think?
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
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Ah, I could hope as well, that something could be done to reinvigorate the forum.

However there are presently a number of factors that put off continuing participation by newer members.

There was great interest once. At one stage (before at least a year and a half ago) every once and a while, there'd be someone that keen to join having trouble, they would track my email down (like wow ) to find out what they could do to register. I also have had at least two write to find out why their account lapsed, one I remember for being a Troller - possibly it was for obvious reasons.

Anyhow, as to the factors, not all relate to the forum's settings. More work places are adopting net monitoring and security software for their net connection to stop their workers goofing off visiting "fun" sites or proxy sites to get around the host file.

Though there are hand held products, I don't think anything beats a nice keyboard and a familiar atmosphere for stimulating online conversations, debates and inevitable flames.

The other factor is of course the "yahoo effect." It won't go away without changing anything. While there are a few people who don't mind commenting in a forum that prunes 30 day old messages, the majority like to know their quips good and not so good, will remain for the life of the forum.

Potential members also size up how fickle the admin is with topics in random or off topic sub forums. When some messages are selectively removed, due to bias, due to disinterest because the topics supposedly distract from the tight framed focus of the forum or some other trivial reason, there will be some potential members who won't even bother to register.

Constant spam I think also puts off members visiting the site, especially when some of it is just gross just reading the title. I have stated for a while the forum really needs to move towards using the power of usergroups to curb the endless spam. I note vx has moved to using a thread to discern who is "human" which works when there are active admins, but an open usergroup works equally until the spammers work it out. Phpbb3 would actually allow a long list of regular members being able to approve new members to a closed group.

Anyhow, at some point, my interest has turned to a broader subject, the category of people about, on the net and in the real world. I was working on it last year, but it also had a few forums directed elsewhere. It got deleted and I didn't have the option to back up the database, so it's been on the back burner. Some of the content would have global appeal, some of it is focused on more local stuff. Though I'm beginning to think I could probably find a way to tuck that away somewhere and split it up.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

Uh...

I'm not entirely sure I understand the concepts behind the words there. For one that's rather long. I actually read it (Multiple times in whole.) so a "tl;dr" wouldn't apply here because of the latter part, but it just seemed to meander and I didn't get the central ideas very well. Going over it one last time I got this:

1: Virtually no interest like before.
2: Dick bosses blocking boards, proxies, etc.*
3: "Yahoo effect."**
4: Spam, of course.

Is that all or is there some stuff I'm missing, or...?

@Categories: Archetypes and/or stereotypes, you mean? Perhaps tropes? (Google "TV Tropes" if you don't know what a trope is. Try not to get sucked in. Seriously, it's horribly addictive.)

*I honestly don't see an extreme problem with this. (I don't know everything; feel free to tell me if I'm wrong.) Most everyone in the modern world has a PC (In the literal sense, "personal computer;" Or "this is a computational machine and it's all mine or pretty close," in other words.) these days, according to what I know. It's ridiculous here in America; because the "less fortunate" get ridiculous monetary support, they probably could and occasionally do afford a monster machine or at least some sort of computer. The only people who really can't afford a PC are the ones that fall through the cracks, which aren't that wide as compared to like it would be if the "crack" was the entire lower end of the green paper spectrum. Obviously this has its bad sides as well (Lots of 'em.) but the point is that a lot of people can get on the 'net in places other than work, especially in "modernized" countries.*^

** I don't know what it is. I looked it up, but it seems to be vastly different things and groups of things depending upon who's asked, all of them having a crazy technical explanation that flies a million miles over my head.

*^ Entirely irrelevant note here: There's really not a very good term for that idea far as I know; Australia is in the economic "northern world" even though it's the continent closest to Antarctica, the "first world" and "third world" actually referred to major alliances in the world war(s?), with first being the proto-NATO/UN parties, second being AoE, and third being anything neutral or so undeveloped they couldn't do anything noteworthy, largely considered to be Africa, though South America and parts of Asia, Oceania, et al. could've fell under it. And of course time does not work like the idea that "modern" powers can exist with "pre-modern" (Or whatever) powers would imply. "Modernized" and so on is just my personal choice for "least horribly among an array of verbal turd sandwiches."
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
forwarding.station.trottam@gmail.com

Uh...
Huh, it should be rather simple. let me sum up each paragraph.

I typed that when I'd gone without sleep for so long as to tax even my insomniac body and mind. Prob'ly not a good idea, but I got a slight nap so I'm fine now by my ridiculous standards. In any case, thanks for the "Derp, what are words?" version. Useful for legacy purposes if nothing else; an archive is useless if there's nobody left who can extract any information from it.

Lemme see.

iPads: Neglecting that they seem to be used largely by the technologically- as well as sanity standard-inept according to what I've seen, in all honesty, I don't think they could connect to much anything aside from internal networks that would have the same problem in the majority of any given stereotypical office building unless they got lucky and could get a consistent signal to bounce off of and/or be amplified by something or other in the building and flood large areas of the structure with magical invisible internet waves. Same for many phones and so on. While that's not absolutely all of the member-base, I'm sure, (If you see someone with a desk and a "desk toy" on that desk, it seems that they have time to fiddle with it on occasion, and any computer they might have nearby and anything that computer can access in the world wide web, as well. And there's always the odd exception like generally bored people that can at a bare minimum think enough to not be banned forever, and over and over again if needed.) it's likely a large portion of it according to statistics and how you're speaking about it.

Yahoo: Ah, I think I see what you're getting at. I've gotta admit I'm almost surely a young'un as compared to you. I don't really recall even as far back as Y2K. 'Til about 5[?] years ago when I joined VX and from there managed to find out about literally all of my current boards and almost all of the sites I now visit in general, directly or indirectly, (One of the members there basically beat basic Google-fu into my thick skull, so I count even everything I've found by a search engine since.) between this point and that, my internet world consisted of Newgrounds, RuneScape, a few other largely game-related things I could find from those two, and distant star-like objects, seemingly visible but not reachable. (4chan et al. were black holes somewhere deep in the sky that I couldn't see and didn't know about until I first heard mention of such "vile hives" on VX.) That said, I do know this: As I see it today, and as I've always seen it, Yahoo sucks. Keeping with the star analogy, it looks like a big wormhole that takes anyone entering to some horrible, far-off place where reality has broken apart entirely, where stupid is smart and smart is stupid, where logic defies all we know to be logical, where time doesn't flow in any logical fashion and history of all known existence as we know it is all wrong from any local's perspective, etc. etc. etc. if you ask me. Around the time I started to become aware of reality in general it seems the same happened to MySpace. It was the talk of the town (internet) until something happened and it was largely replaced by Facebook. It seems to be running in a cycle, happening similarly each time in all but the name of the foolish victim site. Yahoo might not have even been the first to find such a fate for all I know. From what I hear, Usenet might've had a similar fate even earlier, near the very beginning of the internet as we know it today. (You'd likely have a better idea, if any at all.)

Chattiness purging: Is that even done here? Was it ever even done at any point? I'm not entirely sure I see the relevance of that.

Spam: Aye. They're also using usergroups, though not like I think you're speaking of. If I understand correctly our present problem is the whole "Technomagic no work like me want it to" clause.

Categories: Little sociological characterizations with minimal depth and maybe a wacky picture, basically? Might be worth keeping in your head somewhere.

Blocking sites: I dunno about reality, but in my perception of it time is the most abundant resource if you can use it effectively. Even with circumstances like these I figure there should be time to chat a little with friends and liars on the internet. Not necessarily a lot may be the major problem, though.

Yahoo effect, electric boogaloo: It might be that the officially (re-)launched it for the "first time," that there was a legal element where anything pre-'98 about Yahoo was never to be mentioned, or whatever. Also, 540 MB hard-drive? Wow, that's really a big difference if you think a lot about it. I have one in my computer that's 2 terabytes. I would've gotten a 3+ TB one if I could find one in any store about the local area. I've heard of ones going up to 3.6, and they probably go even higher given the gaps time, money, and the like can make. There are also 2 TB disks (Pretty much; they look like a CD/DVD in size and shape and you can carry them about much like their visual progenitors.) out there somewhere. They're not commonly heard of because of infrastructural rather than technological problems. That is, pretty much everyone either doesn't have enough money or doesn't want to spend enough money to get their hands on them. Some day they, or something better, will be what many people just pop in a slot or something without much thought.

Yahoo, electric boogaloo 2: electric boogaloo: I think it might've been foresight. Yahoo just seems terrible now. The only thing I've found useable is the e-mail, just for making socks and such if an admin I'm keeping close like an enemy is smart enough to know that "c94857239845623895@fificorp.org" isn't a very likely e-mail for anyone to actually possess. (I do have one like that, technically, it's just been gone since its ~25-minute life ages ago and impossible to access, at least for me.)

Things like "developed," "prosperous" and so on raise philosophical questions probably best not thought of that could very well grant the title of "best country of the human world" to some dinky "you exist?" country if taken even the slightest bit wrong. My response to philosophy is generally harsh semantics. If a word/phrase/concept/etc. is defined as not at all meaning what you're talking about endless philosophical ramblings quickly become difficult to pull off. If all else fails I could go through every nation with a fine-tooth comb and say "Modernized nations, in contrast to their purely etymological definitions, are defined as the following countries: (Long list of major powers obvious and less so.) ... Excluding the following: (Pretty much every other country in the world, from African hellholes nobody without too much time on their hands should've actually retained any knowledge about to something like Kazakhstan, which is visible on a map if you look only a little and nestled in former Soviet Union borders, right next to modern Russia itself, of war-mongering fame. Possibly even going into the past and including pre-modern superpowers like the Roman and Persian empires if I get too annoyed by philosophical vagueness.)" But for the sake of sanity modernized will do here, seeing as you're either not a philosopher or not an "I'm a moral and scrutiny absolutist, I'm right, anyone who doesn't agree wholly or at least make points that can stab through my thick skull and agree everywhere else is wrong, and here's some crazy reason why" philosopher.
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
forwarding.station.trottam@gmail.com

I'm not in love with the new trendy electronic gizmo's that fit into your front shirt pocket and fall out into the sink or toilet if one happens to bend forwards, or the slightly larger devices that inevitably, the owner has a never ending quest to ensure the screen doesn't get cracked or it is dropped hard enough to screw the pooch.

Signal issues with wireless networks ... yeah that's not a surprise, but I'm betting a lot of it isn't just due to building interference, if anything like here happens. I used to be able to use my old digital phone though the entirety of our local mall. When they started to bring out newer bandwidths, I like a lot of other began to find the original network somewhat lacking. I've held onto mine and won't upgrade to the newer bandwidths, I just want my phone to talk to people when I need to. What though is obvious to me now a number of years later, is I can walk from FULL service signal area, and 20 to 50 yards into the mall my phone won't have a signal. My conclusion is obviously, the mall owners have installed a device to jam such signals. The technology probably isn't affordable that would allow them to reliably jam the newer bandwidths within the mall's boundary.

I think some companies employ a lot of PR people to rake old stuff under the carpet. It wouldn't surprise me if Yahoo! did the same. All I know is I spent what seems like a couple of years at a few yahoo groups, used up quite a bit of disk space archiving, and then suddenly Yahoo! cleaned up. What followed is typical of when an admin deletes on mass some things the active members found interesting. People who took pride in what they write, some of the arguments they'd won, or flame pearls, moved on either somewhere else or simply not at all.

I'd write more now, but I've got a couple of things I've got to rush and and do.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

Part 2.
I should go back and edit part 1, it's pretty er ... a bit of a mouthful, and convoluted.

Moving on though.

Social media sites are something that I'm surprised ever happened, let alone sucked in so many people. TMI is the problem, and this is not a new issue, those of us about in the 90s watched the same sort of thing. Not only was there naive people using their real names, telling a few people in a group their innermost life details, but people would also write about other people in the real world, without the slightest idea that it was probable there might be other people reading who either knew of the general area the person was in or actually realised they or one of their friends knew of that person.

Personal diary blogs, Facebook, myspace, twitter, etc; not everyone is that interesting.

No this place doesn't prune anything, except mindless spam. Some places do prune the random areas, but I hardly see the point of commenting in such places in the first place.

I haven't had a good look, but I believe vx has it set that one of the admins has to move users to groups that can post outside of that particular thread. I think they want it so that just posting moves them to another group, but I could have read that wrong.

Gah, let's try to focus again. We're trying to talk mainly about how to get the site back on its feet, unless you stopped caring about the core subject temporarily for the sake of chatting. We've drifted rather far from that while still saying somewhat relevant things, but some things we're talking about just seem pointless in respect to that now.

VX: Actually, I tried to convince them the method you mentioned would work just fine because of the poorly thought out design of most spam-bots. But they didn't listen and purposefully set it like that despite being able to automate it, and now the admins (Mainly Duth, OJ being consistently absent and VX himself being gone for ages now.) are forced to either put in quite a bit of work -- possibly more work than they'd have to do otherwise -- or slack off and drive potential contributors off. There's also the fact that pretty much the only thing they won't intentionally let in is myself when I'm officially banned (Within minutes of the switch I'd gotten no less than three dozen socks into the "post anywhere" group because of stupid security flaws, so I'm not too worried on that one.) and spambots, which makes it useless for keeping the sewerlings, as Cheesus might call them were he still here to talk about it, out. I thought at least I'd get a break from stomping them out because they'd never be able to get anywhere important, but the staff members are generally more forgiving than I am, it seems. I'm consistently having to slap around one right now.

Dumb bosses: It doesn't really matter. The computers are gonna pick up viruses no matter what. Hell, sometimes annoying viruses (Usually not outright harmful ones unless it's done on purpose, but they can slow down a system and suck up lots of resources doing nothing important sometimes.) can be made from an incompetent code monkey slamming lines of crap together just a bit wrong within the network. Any half-way decent AV -- even a free one, despite what the "buy our overpriced crap" AV marketers probably want them to think -- can stomp them out with ease unless you get a monster, in which case the expensive, bulky ones won't do any better anyway. The sad part, though, is that apparently people in power in those chains actually think it matters. What's worse is they normally have the horrible pride-stemmed mental disorder called "this paper says you can't be right if it conflicts with my perspective on an issue in my field of 'expertise.'"

Keep it in your head: I meant keep thinking about it until such a point that it's sufficiently refined and it can be done right. It's a good idea and I don't think it should be held between your ears forever, if that's what you thought I was saying.

Yahoo: Maybe I'm biased. Something about the whole "web 2.0" look especially bugs the crap out of me. When I first got on the 'net I quickly became accustomed to simple tables, colors, etc. in page designs. Then that craze took hold with rounded corners, carefully crafted background images to make everything look 3D or embossed or detailed or something for vanity, blah blah blah. I quickly came to hate it. I honestly never gave Yahoo that much of a chance that I can remember. VX is about the most 2.0-ishness I can handle, and that's largely because it's dark and doesn't burn my vampire eyes. If they inverted the color scheme I'd probably be gone for months until I could modify my own version of the CSS enough to stand the look and figure out how to load it into the page I actually see. I did it once before, (You might remember me mentioning changing the them I got here.) but I've had to re-install Firefox at least a dozen times since. I'm now contemplating leaving the Firefox crowd, as it's getting rather bloated and glitchy, and they seem to just be wanting to say "My version's higher than yours!" to IE/Microsoft, jumping entire version numbers in single updates that can be just a few weeks apart now.
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
forwarding.station.trottam@gmail.com

Yeah, we're just chatting 'cause "we're still here."

This place is yahoo!ed. Only a significant change will turn things around.

Even with an upgrade, unless the email and IP (proxy) ban list is repealed and usergroups are adopted instead to thwart spammers, I doubt much will change either.

It probably suits the forum's purpose better though, as it is; with only determined people going to the trouble to acquire an email that is accepted and registering so they can either put forward a suggestion or tell everyone about a sighting they've seen and would like some feedback.

I doubt as things are, we'll ever see an active daily crowd that's interested in talking about the different individuals involved in heated debates, riffs, and rifts. I saw while I was doing the big cleanup a couple of months back, that a couple of older members do pop by (by logging in) every now and then. I'd guess a number would simply be lurking around noting how dead the forum is.

From what you say, I'd guess the VX admins are just as concerned with spammers and socks as annoying spambots.

Virii - yep they're going to happen, and the basic free one will do most of the work. Code monkeys do break a lot of things, and so do others in getting around some silly restriction or trying to gain access to do something they shouldn't.

Yes,"in my head" - that's pretty much how it is, and the project remains saved in a text file. I haven't worked on it for almost a year. Unfortunately there's so much for me to catch up on in real life (as I've been chronically ill for a few years with some tropical virus or something) that I've had little time on my hands.

For the most part in the last year, most of my online time had been spent here, cleaning up for a couple of hours every day, ging to the troulbe to vet each and every thread. Stickying and locking the Art of War was the best thing ever IMO. Ten or fifteen posts a day doesn't kill me, though we do still have spambots that flood the forum every once and a while, but due to the lack of real people commenting, I can use the mass thread delete tool, though I've been very very careful after accidentally wiping one of FX's new threads.

The bloated new look of the web ... I think that sucks too. I want fast loading, I like to read threads, not wait around for my old browser to try and load them, as well as sucking up the precious bandwidth.

As to getting things going here again - sigh.

The site's staff are keen to perform an upgrade, they've also said they'd like someone like me to be an admin. Mike has indicated he's keen for an upgrade if it's easy, he'll work on a re-design as soon as he "can get the time." That was almost a year ago. Since then, the domain name has lapsed, so I think I'll stop holding my breath. I do understand that it does take time to decide what the best approach is, heck I've been doing the same for a year at least, just settling on how best to set up a site.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

Hmm. It might be best to just leave a sticky saying something to the effect of "This site's still technically here, but everyone who's left has gone HERE" at this point. Here being another site we made as a brainchild of this one. We may very well not even have to cobble together our own server and get the annoying software on it just right. Some hosts allow extreme outer limits in size, customization, freedom, etc. and provide simple and customizable board-hosting tech. Some of those hosts you don't even have to pay a penny for or paying is really all but a vain gesture of "I like your hosting, so I think you deserve some fancy paper/plastic/whatever." (If there are rewards for paying them, they're trivial in these cases, and probably just used to sucker some people who think "There's more I can get by paying you Xty dollars a month? Sign me up!" without even reading and/or thinking about the benefits into paying enough to make them not have to shut down their servers.) A select few, for example, allow people to host porn. While that may not exactly be something we need to worry about specifically, (We could definitely ban it ourselves if we don't want to bring about the sorts it attracts or whatever.) that's generally the last bastion of regulation short of government-enforced law. If you can post porn, chances are you can do anything legal, therefore they'd probably be the hosts to go for.
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
forwarding.station.trottam@gmail.com

No I wouldn't put a sticky claiming everyone has gone anywhere. I also think having another forum handling suggestions and other comments for this site, isn't a good long term option, though implementing a portal into my project so various interested members could post here, is something I've considered.

Free hosting - Ive looked into it, and of the three I've tried, one fellow went broke so had to quit, another had too many ads and seemed needy with nags now and again, the other just deleted my rather large forum no question, no care, no warning. Writing, I was able to retrieve my small forum database from the chap who went broke, but no amount of emailing did me any good with my large forum.

Free sites probably aren't going to enable access to the database, if the three I've tried are any thing to go by. I considered those three the better of the acceptable, there were plenty of free hosting services I found unacceptable.

The one thing I've found, is a new forum needs to be spot on right from the start, as hiccups can scare off potential members. The rest of the site needs to be more or less up and running as well, if it offers other features. As the content I have in mind is likely to piss a few people off, I also need to consider if I need to worry about DoS attacks.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

Some of the larger and more easily found ones are actually quite good, though they use either entirely non-phpBB software or software only loosely based on the original version. I've tried InvisionFree/Zetaboards (One company, two different sets of software, presumably for two different audiences or sets thereof.) and ForuMotion, (One combined admin interface for any one of 4 potential modified sets of board software, including phpBB 2 and 3, the aforementioned Invision software, and whatever the hell PunBB is. Not as messy as you might think, though I question why they even have four "different" ones when the only visible difference is which themes [CSS pages and so on.] work right on them, and that phpBB 2 allows you to edit a bunch of layouts that they won't let you with the other 3 versions.) because I'm too much of both lazy and incompetent to actually build/buy my own server and get the software to work right on it. (Whenever I try to run phpBB3 on my computer I can never get it to start after turning it off for the first time, which would be a problem later if not sooner and have to delete the entire thing every single time.) Both were pretty good according to what I know. ZetaBoards stands out among those in my mind for being so customizable. I never saw any ads, but that was because of my handy dandy browser add-on.

As for accessing the database directly, it's generally not needed if the admin tools are extensive enough. It's basically interfacing with stuff somewhere in the database anyway, and a thorough ACP = thorough ability to edit the database, save for where it's probably not needed. (E.g. "Hurr durr I'mma take out this part so the software only loads about the first half of any page it's told to.")
_________________
Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
forwarding.station.trottam@gmail.com