A couple of quick points as to Aussieveedubbers' status.
Re-iteration of our forum rules
In the next week or so, you will be required to re-affirm your acceptance of our forum rules. I am pretty sure they will not be changing as they have served us well.
The thread suspension issue which has caused a lot of pot stirring recently is directly related to the rule you have already agreed to, which states:
We don't do this to be kill joys - we are just complying with a bad Australian law. The direct application of lawyers and defamation law has killed some very successful forums (overclockers, a hot rods forum to name two off the top of my head). We do not want a post from any member to KILL us. If you want a forum, you simply don't do this to your community. That's why it's in the rules.You agree, through your use of this service, that you will not use Aussieveedubbers to post any material which is knowingly false and/or defamatory, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, obscene, profane, sexually oriented, threatening, invasive of a person's privacy, or otherwise a violation of any law. You should be aware that in some circumstances material could be defamatory (libellous) even if true or even if a party is not named but can be reasonably deducted from information given.
Any thread doing this will go bye bye without warning. We will endeavor to U2U the thread starter with the news. Seriously, if you start a thread which can go either way or has already crossed the line, expect it to disappear. Due to bugs in this software, it is MUCH safer not to delete individual posts or threads. We simply move offending threads to a hidden protected area. They're not gone, but they're very likely not to come back, either.
This is nothing against anyone in particular, and it is not censorship. It's iron fisted adherence to Australian law. If you don't like it, go see your local member and complain. I'm sure they will not care as many of them get nice swimming pools and snazzy holidays for their entire family from defamation settlements. They're about as likely move on defamation reform as a Frenchman who lives next door to a brothel. (Apologies to Black Adder).
Support of late, and what's going to happen to improve it
As many of you know, things have been a little slow due to e-mail and support issues.
This is due to:
- Our dedicated server is blacklisted by various spam vigilante organizations and there's no way to get off them - despite asking the AFP / AHTCC to get these morons to comply. This means we must move to another server provider and hopefully this time we will not be blacklisted again. Although these asshats have financially and materially damaged us, and we're effectively paying extortion money in order to be able to send e-mail, there's nothing we can do - not even sue them for damages or get them charged under Australian computer crime law.
- The forum software we are using is beta quality, and does not send e-mail properly. I no longer have the time to write it or keep it up to date.
- We do not have enough technical admins. See below.
Resetting the mail support queue
It's just too many requests for me to handle right now. I am going to delete any requests prior to Jan 1 2007. If you still need help and haven't received it by the end of this week (Feb 10), please use the "Contact Us" button to ask for what you need again.
My apologies for this - I literally have too little time to do everything I want to do, and something has to give. In this case, it has been the support queue and the quality of this software.
Moving to a new server with new production quality software
We will be moving *just* Aussieveedubbers to a new server, hopefully to an IP address space which is not blacklisted by asshats. This might happen relatively quickly as our migration is not dependent on changing the software. You should not notice much in the way of downtime.
We will be moving from UltimaBB beta 2 and a bit to vBulletin 3.6.4 by the end of the month. I have to buy a license, and write and test the importation utility to convert our forum to that software. The new software has its own portal software, and that may be used as well. These unknowns may impact the end of February delivery date as I simply don't have the time I once had.
I will be making a test board available for folks to play with in the next couple of weeks or so, with either a blank or a test import of data. If you want to test the new software, please let me know.
Want to help be a sys admin / support manager?
If you are technically bent (particularly if you're a Linux geek or a sys admin in your day job) and have some standing in this community, U2U me directly and we'll discuss how you can help with processing the support queue and other sys admin tasks. The pay sucks, btw. As in there is none.
Andrew
[ Edited on 7-2-2007 by vanderaj ]