Richard Dawkins forum

[templeboy]

Well, there has been a [strike:irhhsr1s]slight[/strike:irhhsr1s] massive hoo-haa over there as the admins tried to introduce a new forum system integrated with the main site. One of the admins then went on a massive spree of censorship and deletion. Read about it here: http://realityismyreligion.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/locked-entry-will-open-soon/

[Recusant]

Having been through similar experiences, not on the net, but in the "meat world," I know how gut-wrenching this is for lots and lots of people.  It sounds to me like this Josh Timonen might have had some ideas that sounded really good to him and management of the foundation, but the community was not taken into account at all:
 

We understand that for some of you it was a place to hang out and converse with like minded people but we are not looking to be a social network. There are many other sites that provide this service.

  Amazingly callous attitude.  Not to mention the fact that it's an incredible PR blunder that will undoubtedly have repercussions for quite a while.

Thanks for posting this, templeboy.

[karadan]

It is amazing the parallel this has with the demise of Star Wars Galaxies - a game i played since its inception until the powers that be decided the players would prefer the game with its community ripped apart. Such a bizarre decision. I can understand the pain the dawkins community feel about this debacle. To have someone with ultimate power completely disregard the hard work and time invesment of hundreds of people just because of a petty prejudice, is a real kick in the nuts, especially when this decision kills the community and ends with the ultimate failure of the original concept.

This Josh Timonen guy sounds like a real piece of work.

[Whitney]

This won't be the first time for that forum to have a massive problem with an admin...they had a split when OBC left a year or two ago

[notself]

Well, there has been a [strike:302d5bhu]slight[/strike:302d5bhu] massive hoo-haa over there as the admins tried to introduce a new forum system integrated with the main site. One of the admins then went on a massive spree of censorship and deletion. Read about it here: http://realityismyreligion.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/locked-entry-will-open-soon/

I was a member of the forum for many years.  I believe it is (was) instrumental in educating the public on the craziness of theology and the sanity of atheism.  Perhaps all of this torture that the site has undergone, including the shut down of the forum, was planned by Josh as a closet theist.  It's one explanaition anyway.

I was a moderator on one of the largest Buddhist sites and it was recently hacked and crashed.  No one can find out the source of the hack but all the loss of the site did was cause younger sites to pick up members.  New communities have formed and are thriving.  This forum will grow and thrive in the same way.

[Whitney]

I was a moderator on one of the largest Buddhist sites and it was recently hacked and crashed.

^why I do my best to remember to regularly back up HAF.  Doing that saved the forum when we got hacked a while back.

[notself]

I was a moderator on one of the largest Buddhist sites and it was recently hacked and crashed.

^why I do my best to remember to regularly back up HAF.  Doing that saved the forum when we got hacked a while back.

The forum I moderated backed up regularly as well. This is how it was explained on Dhamma Wheel, the young forum that is now home to those who belonged to the crashed site.  I hope this site has staggered back ups.

Paññāsikhara wrote:

My understanding is that there was one, but then the host over wrote it with a corrupted copy.
It's curious that the Way Back Machine archive also can't pull out older archives of it, either.

Thanks for that bit of info. That pretty much confirms they didn't have staggered backups.

I'll try to break it down for peeps that aren't familiar with how this works. Some hosting companies provide daily backups as part of their service. What that means is the server your website is hosted on... is backed up once a day. Now, every day at the same time the previous day's backup is overwritten with the current day's backup. The problem here is that once your website is corrupted (or hacked) for more than 24 hours the old backup gets automatically overwritten with the fresh corrupted backup.

I've seen this happen before. People think that because they are doing daily backups they are protected, but by not having staggered backups (daily, weekly and monthly), it leaves them vulnerable to these kinds of unfortunate things.

We have that solved by doing the following back-up process:
We have the hosting company back it up for us (about once a month) and then they send us an e-mail with an attachment with the entire data base. Then we download it to the pc. That way, even if the site got hacked and the hosting server got hacked, the data base is still on the pc, which the hackers could only get to by literally breaking into my house, which virtually no hacker would go to the trouble to do.

[Whitney]

I hope this site has staggered back ups.

Yup, we're safe from that problem...I have to tell it to back up.

[theTwiz]

Looks like...

They had a case...

Of Natural Selection...








YEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

[Tanker]

Looks like...

They had a case...

Of Natural Selection...








YEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

More like Guided selection (think farm animals)