The Forum's Days (were) Numbered

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Sharkey
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The Forum's Days (were) Numbered

Post by Sharkey »

[EDIT] I posted this when it seemed like the only activity in the forum was spam robots posting links to porn, online gambling and prescription medicines. A few of the users noticed and rallied support to keep it going. Don't forget, post early and post often, if I get disgusted with it later, I can always threaten to take it down again. [/EDIT]

Been thinking about it for a few weeks, and I've pretty much decided that I'm going to take this forum down. I had thought in the beginning that it might grow to be a community of users who would interact, answer each other's questions, share information, and develop relationships in the process.

Mostly, though, it's been me, posting apparently to myself. All Sharkey, All the Time.

Not that this doesn't have uses though, so in my "spare" time over the next few days or weeks, I'm going to explore blog software, and the likely result is that the replacement will be a one-way display of information such as POTD or my occasional posts about Housetruck life, an interesting web site, or some event or other that I attended. I'll probably disable the posting of comments in the new blog.

This is not to say that I don't appreciate nearly every post that people have gone out of their way to write here, you've all been great. It's just that there's too little life here for the amount of concern and maintenance required to keep it running.

Lately, all phpBB forum software all over the world has been under attack by automated spam messages displaying porn, casinos, medications, etc. This forum has been hit multiple times, and it's not even listed in Google because I've denied search bots from indexing it. The next step in security is to disable Guest posting, which will suck that much more life out of the forum.

I don't know if there is a way to convert some of the more interesting threads in this forum over to threads in the new blog, or whether I will just disable the forum to the point where it is "read-only". More as I learn about blogging and how it might interact with the existing database.

If anyone has any convincing arguments one way or the other, I'm listening. Lacking something to change my mind, it's about over for this board.
Last edited by Sharkey on Thu Apr 13, 2006 5:13 pm, edited 3 times in total.
Griff
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Re: The Forum's Days are Numbered

Post by Griff »

I, for one, will be sorry to see it go! I understand the reasoning behind your thoughts of taking down the forum, but am saddened by the thought that the wealth of information and entertainment it contains may be lost to us forever. :cry:

I realize that I haven't posted much, but that's simply because my conversion is going excruciatingly slowly so there isn't much to post about it. I also haven't "been there, done that" yet on some of the finer points of the building process therefore I don't have much information that is of any use or benefit to post. (I don't like to post just for the sake of posting.)

I hope that the information contained herein can be transferred to your new blog (should you decide to go that route), because I would still like to have the reference material available for when I get to certain stages of my conversion. All the sections of this board contain bits & pieces of relevant & useful "how-to" stuff that would be impossible to collect by one's self endlessly searching the web.

Looking at it from your standpoint (All Sharkey, All the Time), the blog does make sense, although, IMHO you haven't just been "posting to yourself", I, and many others I'm sure, have gotten much from your efforts. The fact that I and others like me don't have much to contribute (yet) further justifies your reasoning, though.

The technical wealth of this board aside - the sheer delight in submerging myself in the "Grace" saga and the PTOD, as well as other engrossing reading available on this board are another area the loss of which will be sorely felt.

Can I convince you to change your mind and keep the forum up? Probably not, and if your heart is not in it anymore, then you SHOULD take it down so you CAN follow your heart.

That said, I will not watch it disappear without giving tribute to the effort it takes to maintain this site, the amassing of the technical data it contains, and the "get-away-from-it-all" ramblings that are so nice to escape into.

I have thoroughly enjoyed being one of the lucky ones to have found this site. I have only four sites that I find worthy of visiting every day to see if there are new posts to enjoy, or maybe even be able to respond to with something beneficial to the poster or the group, and this forum is one of them. While it may mean not being able to post or comment, at least if there's a blog, I can still watch the documentary even if I can't participate in it.

I will still be visiting this site daily until it grows the way you had envisioned at it's birth, or until it dies a quiet, dignified death and I must move on with only my memories of it.

I make no apology for this long post, as I feel you and your efforts should not go unnoticed.

I wish you the best at whatever you decide! If that means blog, I hope you will post the link prior to dismantling this board, so faithful readers can still ride along.

SALUTE!

Griff
~(G)Q Arduously Avoiding Assimilation
forgottenhighway

Post by forgottenhighway »

Sharkey,
I for one enjoyed this forum. I would probably post more often but I haven't started my housetruck project yet so I really don't what to ask. This forum has given me lots of ideas though. I wonder if most of your target audience is not online...off the grid so to speak. I have enjoyed reading all the adventures with your diesel pusher rabbit. I think your housebus project is a very high quality build and again, given me many ideas. I would like to see the website continue even if it was frozen just for reference material...perhaps a blog added later for updates from the road...just a few random thoughts.

PS. Please finish the "30 Years in a Housetruck"...something else I enjoyed.

Best regards,Pat
Sharkey
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Post by Sharkey »

Thanks for the comments. I need to hear that someone is actually reading this stuff and that I'm not posting to myself. You don't have to post about Housetrucks. An interesting web site, or online article would be enough to share in the "Other Stuff" section, or something similar to let us know that there is a live audience out there.

Once again, I came home to find a message on my answering machine from Roger Beck telling me that there was spam posted in the forums. These days spam outnumbers real posts about 8:1, so I don't need to tell you why I'm disillusioned with the process. It's like having all the scum from my email inbox puked up on the web site where everyone can see it.

I'd just as soon turn off Guest posting to keep this crap off the forum, but then posters like Pat wouldn't have the freedom to post anonymously without registering. It just pisses me off to no end that a few jerks with useless crap to peddle are controlling what I can do with my own web site's forum. Added to this is the fact that I have yet another new phpBB version update to apply, a process that takes a couple of hours at best on this forum, as I have a variety of custom modifications and have to hand-edit a thousand or more lines of code into the software to stay current on security and features.

From the very beginning, I've disallowed search and directory robots from indexing any of the forum pages. This was partly because I didn't want there to be a ton of dead search results if I took the forum down, but mostly because Google and other searches are the method that hackers and spammers use to find their victim forums. Looks like this one got placed on a list somewhere, I've been getting hit regularly and hard, I log literally hundereds of failed hacking and spam attempts each week.

Not indexing pages with search bots has probably made traffic here less than it might have been. People searching for information aren't being directed to the forum by search results because of the denial. I ~could~ open indexing with a change to my robots.txt file, and all of the posts here would be indexed within a week or two. Once indexed, I'd be getting referred to by Google and others whether the forum was here or not. Don't know exactly what to think about that, if I was more sure that I wanted to keep the forum up, I might do it.
Last edited by Sharkey on Sun Apr 09, 2006 6:46 pm, edited 2 times in total.
etinhidesert

Post by etinhidesert »

Sharkey,

In my travels through Eugene these past few weeks I have been driving up the Delta Hiway from the 5 to Beltline Hiway hoping to see the Crown on the move (or just see it). I too have been inspired by your workmanship and ideas, not to mention the technical info posted within the website.
Hope your property search has been fruitful.

Elden in Hesperia
Sharkey
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Post by Sharkey »

Thanks for the kind words, Elden. You could almost see the Crown from Delta highway if you knew where to look. Maybe one day you'll come to town with some spare time and be able to come see it in person.

I've implemented some more severe restrictions on Guest posting in order to weed out more of the spam. I had already instituted "Visual Confirmation", that is a code that is displayed as an image that must be entered to post as a Guest. Apparently, either humans are entering the code, or optical character recognition has been integrated into the spam bots programs, because that wasn't stopping all of the spam messages.

The change is that I reworked the code to use "FREECAP" images, which are much more difficult to decipher by machine. In fact, they are sometimes so distorted that I have trouble reading them myself. This might make Guest posting a bit more difficult, at least requiring a few tries to get past the code. If the spam continues, I will disable Guest posting altogether, and the forum will die a little more because of it.

Here's an example of the confirmation code on a good day:

Image

If I can stop the spam, I'll feel just a little bit better about keeping the forum up.
Stillphil
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Yikes!

Post by Stillphil »

Well, shoot! I was just starting to get fired up! I understand if it's too much trouble for not enough gain. There wasn't much traffic lately. BTW, the last time I tried to post, mine didn't show up. Maybe I did it wrong.

Anyway, thanks for all you do for the nomad community!!

Phil
Illegitimi non carborundum!
Dudley
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Swan Song

Post by Dudley »

Dearest Mr Sharkey,
I would have responded sooner but I have been mourning the bad news. After some thought I decided that I must register on your site as soon as possible and be a lurker no more! Griff, Pat, Elden (what is a “Hesperiaâ€
GOD BLESS AMERICA
Griff
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Post by Griff »

Dudley, that was PERFECT!
~(G)Q Arduously Avoiding Assimilation
captainkf
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a sad, sad thing

Post by captainkf »

Sharkey, Thank you for your wisdom and time. I have apprecitated all the information and your stories. Other's have summed up my feelings already about not posting much. This is the most unique alternative mobile dwellings that chimes with my soul. Especially since I started working as a parts guy at an RV dealership (temporarily). The mass garbage that consumers feel is the only option is very sad and I appreciate the emphasis on quality and durabililty with a slightly granola edge that I find here. It will be a true loss if you decide to leave, however I can be thankful for all I have been able to learn (and stories to laugh and feel apart of the adventure).

Thank you Sharkey.

-Richard
Tim Clevenger
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Post by Tim Clevenger »

Hi Sharkey,

I'm just here for your posts, so I could go either way. Maybe you can have an anonymous guest account and only give out the password to people who specifically email you asking for it? Then lock it down so only registered (and approved) users and the Guest account can post.

As for patching, I can't help you there. Maybe there's a better software package that doesn't need so much patching?

Tim
Sharkey
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Post by Sharkey »

Well, I'm beginning to get the idea that there are actually people out there who look at this thing.

Dudley;
Thanks for registering. I didn't really mean to shake the lurkers out of the trees, I lurk on several boards that I will never register at, partly because not posting means never getting flamed or being offended personally.

The This Old House article was kind of a fluke, but it sent visitor views on the site through the roof. The week that issue hit the subscribers mailboxes, March 20, 2005, I saw a record number of page views, 29,233 requests for pages. For anyone who missed it, I keep a PDF copy on the server.

Richard;
Interesting to hear that you're pushing RV's. Want to become a pusher for Roger's book? :D

Tim;
So far, the FREECAP Visual Confirmation seems to be working, I haven't had a spam post in a couple of days. I just hope that the images aren't so distorted that people can't read them.

phpBB is an amazing collection of code, but being open source means that the script kiddies, hackers and spammers can reverse engineer their attacks by reading the code. Although they are very persistent, the phpBB development community does a very good job of keeping ahead of them with frequent updates. I don't mind updating so much, it's actually how I learned php programming, working with this board's code.

From what I understand, ~all~ forums and blogs are under attack right now. There are sites that will, for $10 paid by paypal, spam 5,000 posts with whatever your web site address is. Many of these spam attacks are orignated in Russia, so it looks like the cold war has turned into the spam war.

I doubt that there is another forum software package as flexible and configurable as this one. About the only way to get more security would be to go to one of the corporate forum/blog providers, where you get what they offer, and that's all. I enjoy hosting the forum myself and being able to add in modifications and adjust the style to fit my site's look and feel.

My major frustration was seeing spam posts outnumber real posts. That and the feeling that I was posting to myself (wanders off, mumbling to himself).
etinhidesert

location

Post by etinhidesert »

I figure your current property is northwest of the golfcourse on the north side of Delta Hiway at the base of the hill. Is that close?

Hesperia is in the high desert of Southern California, between Cucamonga and Barstow. We have over 120,000 poeple in the area of Hesperia, Victorville, and Apple Valley. Hope that helps.

Elden in Hesperia
Sharkey
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Post by Sharkey »

OK, so I've decided to not kill the forum, at least not this week, It shouldn't be necessary to threaten to delete it all just to get people to post. You don't have to post important stuff, let's just get some dialog going!!!

Elden;
You're pretty close, I'm on the west flank of Gillispie Butte just high enough so that I look over the neighborhood (at least for a few more weeks, then I don't know what or where).
cathy
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Post by cathy »

Gee I'd miss this forum. This site has been like tuning in for some really great chapters in a really great book. Since I am not building and do not own a housebus I have lived/traveled thru these pages.

Over the years I have collected quite a few books on self sufficiency, communes, alternative building/construction so this site has been right on for my interests. I have enjoyed so much (and envied) the out of box living and thinking.

Hope you change your mind, Sharkey!!!

Cathy
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