Jay

TV's Frink said:

How about donations?  I'd gladly contribute a bit of scratch.

I'm hesitant to accept donations because I run this site under a registered business entity (LLC), so I report the income and get tax deductions for hosting and other expenses. I don't know what the implications would be.

I wasn't able to access the site last night either, but it was straight-up unavailable. I contacted the hosting service and asked them to investigate.

RicOlie_2 said:

And quit complainin' because it's a lot of work to build a website from scratch and we can't have it all.

There are a lot of things I'd do if ot.com were a full-time occupation, but running a community is very difficult to turn into a profitable venture unless you have millions of page views per month. And even then, it's tough to find sponsors when a lot of your content exists within a legal grey area. I'm sure those of you who've been around for a while have noticed that the banner ads are gone, and what little income this site was generating went away with them.

I share everyone's pain. As a creative professional, it's normal for me to hate anything I design or build within a week of launching it. That just comes with the territory :) So you can imagine how I feel about forum software I designed and built 7 years ago. It's embarrassing, frankly. It's ugly, outdated, not mobile friendly, and hard to maintain.

I've been weighing my options as far as next steps, and none of them are quick or easy. Migrating to new software would be extremely painful and complicated. The software I've been working on (based on Node.js) is progressing slowly, but I have no timeframe for completion. Right now, I'm thinking the best approach is to introduce something barebones (basic post/reply functionality) and then build it up from there. The current software's framework has made incremental improvement difficult, but the modern framework I'm building should make it much easier to add functionality over time and improve performance substantially.

We'll see. This is definitely the year for a major change, whatever form it takes. This place has been languishing for too long. With the new trilogy coming, I'd like ot.com to be a destination for Star Wars fans, so it's time to figure something out and get it done.

Bingowings said:

Or I get a 'java.net' fault message like the other day which seems to indicate a Microsoft server problem as those sorts of messages don't appear on Unix servers.

Please take a screenshot of the error or copy/paste it the next time you see it. The site doesn't run on .NET, but ColdFusion, which is based on Java.

Can you explain the nature of these outages a little more?

If the application server is running normally, but the database isn't responding to requests, then the server would throw an error. If the application server (or web server) weren't responding, then the request would time out and the browser would throw an error.

Any outages since?

Error messages would be helpful if you can copy/paste those.

If you can establish a pattern, let me know. Otherwise, I haven't received any similar complaints.

What are your notification settings under Preferences?

You can set it so that you get an e-mail for every new post in a subscribed thread (not recommended), or receive a single e-mail for the first new post and not be notified again until you view the topic, which I believe is the default.

In addition, clear your cookies after you request the new password, but before you login. There might be some lingering session weirdness going on.

TV's Frink said:

I'm just shocked that Jay posted. :p

IP comparison is good enough for me.  But I still find the guy annoying, even if he's not Sam.

If being annoying were a ban-worthy offense, the Off Topic section would be far quieter.

For the record, and based on the mods' research, there are no matching IPs between darklordoftech and Father Skywalker. That's the only factual evidence I see either way.

Everyone should probably tone it down a bit. If any of this spreads outside the Off Topic section, all parties involved will get temp bans.

It's cool. I haven't been able to devote the time I'd like to the site and that's not really fair to you guys. This was a fairly simple drop-in replacement, so I just figured I'd knock it out tonight while I had time. Hopefully, it fixes things.

I updated the post editor to the latest version of TinyMCE (3.5.10) supported by our current version of jQuery (the admittedly ancient 1.3). This should resolve the formatting bugs you've been experiencing. I recommend clearing your browser cache to make sure you're running the latest version.

Please post any issues you find in the Bug Reports forum.

That's another situation, and a non-technical one. May or may not be permanent. No details to share right now.

At some point in the recent past, the ot.com web site experienced a security breach. We discovered that some existing files in the web directory had been modified, and a few new files had been added.

The only files that were modified were in the site's web root, indicating that someone managed to gain FTP access. The hosting service changed our FTP login credentials as a precaution and verified that all server software is running the latest security patches.

Out of an abundance of caution, we also requested that the database login credentials be reset as well (which caused the brief outage that occurred this evening). There is no indication of any security breach in the database server, and no indication that anyone has accessed our site's data. Resetting the login credentials was done strictly as a precautionary measure.

We'll keep you updated if any other issues arise. I'll keep this topic open in case anyone has any concerns, but again, there's no reason to think that anyone's account information has been accessed.

Doctor M said:

If we're talking requests, how about one email per thread for replies.

Preferences > Topic and Post Settings > When I'm subscribed to a topic, send me an update only once until I view the topic again.

I have no idea why I never uploaded this for you. Just added it.

I removed the offending code. Note that it's not really a virus, just HTML that's been inserted for link spamming. I'm pretty sure it's harmless to end users, but it does demonstrate there's some kind of security issue with the host, who I've contacted about the problem.

Moth3r said:

It's a warning that someone else is using blackhat SEO techniques by, presumably, exploiting a vulnerability on ot.com's server to inject those backlinks. Although I don't know what they expect to gain from it as I'm pretty sure Google's algorithms are clever enough to ignore non-displaying links.

I removed the links, didn't know they were there. I'll also inform the host of the exploit.

Since AVG's site doesn't seem to define what the threat actually is, it's hard to tell if it's a problem or not. Is it a virus, or is it just a warning against blackhat SEO techniques (which I don't knowingly use and aren't a real threat of any kind regardless)?

I honestly don't think there's anything to worry about, but that's easy for me to say as a Mac user ;)

I doubt we'll ever host any files here directly. Too much risk involved.

Moth3r said:

There don't seem to be any of the old threads on the new software, I seem to remember there was a loss of data around 2005.

Those old threads aren't lost. I archived them when we started having performance problems on the old software. Since they were in separate database tables when I installed the new software, the scripts I wrote to port the data didn't include them. They're still in those tables, so it's possible to port them over at some point.

Happy 10th anniversary, everyone. Thanks for hanging around so long :) It's been my pleasure to keep the lights on for you.

The 10th Anniversary depends on what you consider our go-live date.

This teaser went live in June 2002:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020624033636/http://www.originaltrilogy.com/

The original petition and forum went live on March 10, 2003:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030329102201/http://www.originaltrilogy.com/

My forum join date is a couple weeks prior to that because I installed and tested the old software before the launch.

I'd say the 10th anniversary is tomorrow.

I disabled search. As everyone knows, it's terrible anyway. Just use Google for now.

Not a bad idea. I'll add it to the feature list in the updated software. Thanks.