Rules , Regulations, and Notices

Looks like we might have been down for around 12 to 15 hours. Can't be sure as I haven't been to the site since earlier on Thursday. We have been experiencing some odd problems with the server lately and I have no explanation at this time. In particular our email server has been acting up which means notifications and new member messages might have been delayed or even completely skipped. I am working with tech support and hope to have a resolution soon. We may be rebooting frequently over the next few days.

Nothing has been changed on the server so this is definitely a mystery and could be the result of a malicious user or someone outside the community. Both have been the case in the past.

I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this has caused anyone. This is not related to the 'missing login box' issue from a few days back. That was purely an article formatting problem.

Thanks for your support and patience.

Todd

The recent issue with the front page not displaying properly had to do with an article that was promoted to the front page. Occasionally if an author pastes an article from Word or other programs, the formatting will carry over and affect the rest of the site. I removed the article from the front page and it seems to have done the trick. I will try to fix the article so that it can resume its position on the front page. If I can't, I apologize to the author and will have to keep it off the front page.

Sorry to everyone for the inconvenience and thanks to the members who alerted me to the problem.

Edit: I was able to fix the article in question and restore the article back to the front page. For everyone's learnin', make sure that you don't use a word processor or any other program or web resource to cut and paste an article to the site. You can use Scribefire or Live Writer if you know those programs to submit content to your blog. But other than that, please write the article within the editor provided by the site. You can also cut and paste from a plain text editor like notepad. If you must use a wordprocessor there is a 'paste from Word' button in the editor. Also, always use the 'Clean Up Messy Code' and/or 'Remove Formatting' button (select all text before using either button) before hitting the submit button. The editor we provide is fairly full featured, including spell checking, so you should be able to do most of your work on site.

Thanks!

You should all be fine. I isolated an issue that shouldn't have caused anyone any grief. Fortunately nobody hacked the file system of the site, which is always the biggest concern for a site owner. But please, always heed the warnings of your security software.

The site is safe and we will stay vigilant at keeping the hackers at bay.

Ladies & Gentlemen, we love your Blog contributions, but when making a Blog entry, please take the second or two that's required to select the appropriate category(s) that your entry might fall into... You can select one or more of the categories available under the "News: *" dropdown... Yes, the RED asterisk is to remind you to select something.

I am just testing the gmap feature of the site. This is the house I grew up in.

We got shut down by our hosting provider for consuming too many resources on the server. Some of you have heard about this before. Well last night was very serious. The note they sent me said that we were shut down permanently. I begged with them to let us have another chance and I would do everything I could to reduce the resource usage. I have done that but I am also monitoring the resource usage and it doesn't look good.

A spell checker is now part of the WYSIWYG interface. Look for the button with the ABC and checkmark on it. Once you run the spellcheck, it will underline the words it doesn't like. Just right-click on each underlined word and from the context menu choose your preference.