Topics

1

OESF Announcements / How're Things Running? Do We Need To Add Anything?

« on: August 30, 2008, 06:37:12 pm »

It seems that things have been running very smooth lately.  Some spam, but it's been nailed pretty well thanks to our admin/mod team.

The question I'm posing to you guys is is there anything that you want added or changed?  I'm going to be upgrading us to the latest version of IPB soon, but I'm pretty sure it's just bugfixes and not features or anything.

2

ELSI General Discussion / Any Interest For Maintaining The Elsi?

« on: July 17, 2008, 05:54:05 pm »

I have to admit, I never really touch it anymore because of other priorities.  Would anyone be interested in maintaining the ELSI?  Skillsets required would be PHP, HTML and MySQL.

The code probably needs lots of updating.  I wrote it when I was just getting into PHP, but it seems solid enough in that it's working.  Surprisingly, it's still access rather frequently.

If noone speaks up, I might try toying around with adding more features when I have the time.  If interested, just post in here or PM me and give me an idea of your skills so I know I'm not giving it away to anyone.

3

Asus Eee PC / Asus Eee Pc?

« on: January 07, 2008, 09:04:19 am »

Has anyone tried this?  Is it worth it for us to create a sub-forum for it?  From everything I've read, it seems like a pretty cool device and is kinda in the realm of the other devices we support here.

Thoughts/Opinions?

4

OESF Announcements / Happy Holidays

« on: December 18, 2007, 10:18:16 am »

Just wanted to wish everyone a safe and happy holiday.  2007 was a rocky year for us, but we seem to be settled in now so 2008 should hopefully be smooth sailing.  I also wanted to give a special thanks to the Wiki staff for taking charge and managing the wiki.  I don't know much in that area, so I really appreciate them doing that.  Make sure you guys thank them if you happen to stumble into their forum

Anyway, be safe and have fun.  I'll toast a drink to this fine community come New Years

Roy

5

Off Topic forum / Olpc Program

« on: November 12, 2007, 02:09:51 pm »

Most of you probably know about the OLPC Laptop program.  Pretty neat little laptop thingy they have going.  They have their two week 'give 1 get 1' program and it's for a good cause.

Anyway, I'm gonna order one just because I think it's a good way to promote Linux and I'll probably give the Laptop as a Christmas gift to one of my little cousins.  Figured I'd let those that haven't been following it know about it in case they were interested.

Here's a link to the program:  http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/index.php
And some specs on the laptop itself:  http://bc.tech.coop/blog/071112.html

Peace =]

6

OESF Announcements / Oesf News

« on: September 28, 2007, 12:54:46 am »

Ok, just thought I'd give you guys some updates on the latest happenings here.  

First off, if you haven't noticed, we've switched to the latest version of IPB.  With that comes some additional user features, lots of security and anti-spam updates and misc. administrative stuff.  Our Admin Control Panel has been practically completely rewritten and is much, much easier for us to use.  Registration now has a captcha involved and allows us to let users openly register without admin approval.  The board itself seems to be running much faster.  All in all, it's a very worthwhile upgrade and I'm happy it went as it did.

I've also changed the default theme to a modification I did of the IP.Professional theme.  I think it's a little cleaner for the boards and makes us look a little more professional.  You guys are free to use any theme you like (use the dropdown at the bottom left to change it), but that's going to be the default one for guests and new users.  If there are any huge objections let me know.

There is 1 outstanding issue left and it's out of my hands.  The forums right now are in, well, 'forum'.  This is a NFS issue that we had the 'priveledge' of finding for Ibiblio and they're doing their best to work on it.  Basically I used the 'mv' command to move the testing forums from the 'forum' folder where I had been testing them back to 'forums'.  This triggered some kind of bug and left us where we're at.  They will eventually be moved back to the 'forums' folder, but I'm waiting on Ibiblio for everything.  That's the only forum issue I know of right now.

The Wiki has also been upgraded to the latest MediaWiki version.  I'm not going to claim to be any kind of expert in that area, but from what it seems it's good.  With that I've also added 2 new admins to it:  Meyer and Tux.  They'll be overseeing the Wiki stuff and making sure things don't get out of hand.  Right now I'm not sure if I want to integrate the user databases for the forum and the Wiki.  I think it might be better to leave them separate in case we ever have to split the two up or something.  I do intent to install a captcha for the Wiki registration and hopefully will get to that this weekend.

Outstanding issues for the Wiki are the captcha and it seems the image gallery is broken.  Stuff that I'll look at this weekend.

Finally, we added a new user group in the Asia section.  It's the Japanese User Group and is going to be watched over by Meyer.  As we discussed in the initial thread, users are welcome to speak in Japanese or English in there.  That goes for any of the user groups obviously.  We're not about to dictate to you guys how you communicate.  All we ask is that if something beneficial to the community happens, translate for rest of us

Thank you all for bearing with me as I do these upgrades.  Hopefully things will be a smooth ride from here on out and we can get back to the normal routine around here.

Roy
OESF Admin Team

7

Off Topic forum / Motorcycles Anyone?

« on: September 27, 2007, 11:17:58 pm »

Anyone else here ride?

8

OESF Wiki / Spam

« on: September 26, 2007, 12:12:00 pm »

Hey Gents,

I'm not that great with Wiki stuff.  I can barely figure out how to message someone on there (it's the talk page, right?).  Anyway, could you guys try and find out what anti-spam measures are available to us and I'll implement them?  A captcha would be convenient if it's there.  I'm looking into merging the accounts tables, but that might take a little bit.

Thanks,
Roy

9

OESF Announcements / Forum And Wiki Upgraded

« on: September 26, 2007, 01:14:36 am »

Ok, the forum should be fully upgraded now.

I broke the Wiki.  Not really broke.  I just need to figure out the command to run PHP5 from the command line.  Anyway, let me know how the forum runs please.

Also, all validating accounts were deleted.  Users can now freely register without us having to validate them.

Edit:

Things to fix




4. Move forum back to 'forums'.  I have a ticket open with Ibiblio about this issue.  There is no 'forums' folder on the actual drive..  what the heck is the http forums table linking to?

Done.  Looks like everything is good to go now, so let me know if there are any issues.

Well, 4 WAS fixed.  Now it's broken again, so site is back to 'forum'.  Ibiblios official response:

You're seeing an interesting NFS issue that we haven't seen before. Not a major cause for concern, though.

We're consulting with the hardware vendor and will have a response to you directly once we're sure of the root cause.

Things to remember:

 * your data is backed up off-site nightly
 * your data is stored on redundant physical media for high availability
 * the hardware vendor gives us good support which we pay for
 * the hardware vendor is well-respected in the industry

We're confident we'll have this worked out soon.  

10

OESF Announcements / Whats Needs To Be Fixed?

« on: May 24, 2007, 02:15:14 am »

As usual, life's been busy as usual for me since my move down to Texas.  New job, new house blah blah excuses whatever who cares.  Anyway, I'm trying to set aside a couple days to just fix everything that's broken on this site.  I'm shooting for this weekend, but please don't shoot me if I can't.

I am aware of the attachments issue.  Is there anything else?  Anything you guys want added?  Give me a nice laundry list of stuff to do and order it by priority.

Things to note:
- I don't have access to the old stuff, Mike does.  This means that any missing files are out of my reach.
- The site might be down at times if I need to replace something.  Expect outages.
- I would love to upgrade to the latest IPB, but I need to find the files and I dont have access to our customer portal.  I'll do my best on that end.
- Texas is much hotter than back home.

11

OESF Announcements / Site Maintenance

« on: December 01, 2006, 02:34:52 pm »

Hey Crew

First off, let me give you my apologies for the past couple weeks.  I'm in the process of moving 2000 miles and starting a new job, so I haven't been as active.  Last I talked to Mike, he was overseas for work.

I know the guest validation thing has been a huge pain in the butt.  This was originally implemented so that we could have less spam, but we didn't anticipate that every single one of us would get busy at the same time.  Usually at least one of us is very active.  To help remedy this, I have turned off admin verification for all new accounts.  Instead, and I suppose I should've done this from the beginning, I have set up one of those random image displays for registering.  This will make it so we don't have to approve every single account that comes in.

On the other side of this, I do feel like we should have more mods to fight whatever spam we do get.  Once the spam starts coming in again, I'm gonna start looking for people to help out.  If you're willing to help, please let me know when the time comes.  Ideally, I'd like someone that's been here for a while and knows the way things function.  I'll give more details when the time comes.

Ok well, have a good weekend crew.  Any questions, as usual, feel free to pm me.

Roy

12

Florida / What To Do In Orlando?

« on: August 20, 2006, 12:36:58 pm »

I'm down here for business for the next week and bored out of my mind.  I'm about 5 minutes from Disney in some Marriot hotel.  Any recommendations on what to do for the week?

13

OESF Announcements / Spaaaaaam

« on: August 12, 2006, 02:07:48 am »

Hey guys,

I just wanted to apologize for the influx of spam lately.  The whole admin and mod team have been doing a great job of responding to the reports, so keep them coming in.  

I'd like to, at some point, implement a captcha system for creating accounts.  That should help in greatly reducing the number of fake accounts registered which in turn will reduce the spam.  Unfortunately, most of the admin team including myself have been busy with our personal lives.

We still have that account at ibiblio.  I still plan on moving us there at some point.  Things are ready to be migrated.  Just be patient with us and eventually we'll get there

Enjoy the forums,

Roy
~

14

OESF Announcements / Hosting Issues And Details

« on: May 10, 2006, 06:19:11 pm »

Hey Crew,

I know we've been having a lot of issues lately with our hosting here.  Mike has been dealing with our hosting provider and trying to get that resolved.

In the meantime though, we do have another solution in the works.  I've been in contact with the folks at ibiblio the past couple weeks and they have approved hosting the OESF Forums and site for us.  Mike's been paying out of pocket for this whole thing (which means all of you should give him a thank you note, .. and, a beer ) for a long time, so it'll be nice to get that load off his shoulders.  We've been watching ibiblio for a year now and have seen them change a lot of things for the better.  They host the elsix for us and we haven't had many issues with their hosting there.

Within the next couple weeks, I'll be doing some testing on their server to make sure the transition will be smooth.  I'll use that time to also upgrade the forums to the latest version and do any special tweaking to make sure it runs nice for all 9300 of you.  It should (hopefully) be an easy transition, but we all know that it's never that simple.

Once the time comes to move over, I'll inform everyone of the cut-off date for posting.  At that date, I'll be shutting down the forums and taking a copy of the DB.  Put the copy over at ibiblio, turn on everything there and cross my fingers.  If all goes according to plan, the forums will turn on without issue, cheerleaders will be cheering me on, and we'll be able to resume forums and Wiki service without a hitch.

Now I don't know about the cheerleader bit there, but I think we should be ok with the forums part of that last statement.

Anyways, thanks for sticking with us through all of this.  The address for the site will obviously stay the same.  The only difference you guys should notice is a little ibiblio logo somewhere on the page and an upgrade in the speed.

Also, let me say thank you to those that take the time to report the spam.  After the move is done, I plan on looking into some kind of member authentication to help fight this spam.  Until then, those little 'Report' buttons are always there for you guys to let us know.

Ok well, thanks for reading.  Until next time.. ~

15

Site Suggestions, Requests, and Updates / Software Site

« on: February 24, 2006, 07:58:39 pm »

I tried to make it as non-obtrusive as possible.  Is that cool with everyone?

Also, and I know this is a touchy question, but what software site do you guys want up there.  I'd rather not put all 3 of them up there.

In fact, I am going to attach a poll to this post and we can vote like that.  Once I see one of them is a clear winner, I'll choose that.