As most of you have probably noticed, Moose deactivated the OG today. Evidence would suggest that Daniel paid the server bills because the URL is still connecting, but it's possible the month end period hasn't expired yet, and it will be gone tomorrow. I don't know. Either way, the old forum has been toggled to inactive, so there is nothing left to view. It's really just a footnote at this point, as we had to shutdown new member registration last week after the spam filter failed and over 3K spammers lined up at the door. Several hundred made it through before that, so we had to hide the threads to prevent them from scraping or otherwise exploiting the user content. But nothing has been deleted... just hidden or deactivated. Daniel can log in at any time and restore everything with a single mouse click, but he hasn't been seen since 2022.
So.... that's it. Not a bang but a whimper. End of the day, the community survived and is stronger than it's been in years, so there's nothing to be sad about. Those emotions were sorted and discarded awhile ago for me. I'm just grateful there was a happy ending.
Moving on:
So.... that's it. Not a bang but a whimper. End of the day, the community survived and is stronger than it's been in years, so there's nothing to be sad about. Those emotions were sorted and discarded awhile ago for me. I'm just grateful there was a happy ending.
Moving on:
- I purchased the Persistent Alerts add-on so our notifications should look more like they did at the OG. Basically, if you are watching a thread, whether with emails, push-notifications, or the regular red bell, you will now receive an alert each time it is updated. Under the default Xenforo system, you would only receive one alert until you revisited the thread, so if you checked your alerts quickly and didn't click on anything, that would be all you got. Now it will continue to alert you to new stuff whether you clicked on it or not.
- I've been tracking user activity with our new 24 Hour counter. It's only been 3 days, but we're averaging 82 member visits a day. That's triple what we saw at the OG when you exclude the spammers. That's awesome.
- We installed the new medal engine and are ready to hand out some hardware. You should get some of that. The Fourth Contest is open for submission now and the Short Story Contest will be open on June 1st. I misspoke last update about the Poetry Contest. We're going to run that on 7th of each month instead of the 15th like we used to. Then by Flash will begin on the 15th, with that whacky Fourth Contest following on the fourth Saturday of each month. That puts all four contests on a semi-weekly rotation.
