board77

As some of you know, I made a MB for my family here on phpbber.com, and thus get the messages from phpbber.com from time to time.

I got one yesterday that ended with this statement:

phpbber.com wrote:

PLEASE NOTE:
We review our free forums regularly. Forums with the following content
will be removed without any warning:

Violence or racial intolerance
Illicit drugs or drug paraphernalia
Gambling or casino-related content
Pornographic, adult, or mature content
Excessive profanity/vulgar languages
Hacking/cracking content
Illegal MP3/Movie/Applications link
Illicit or illegal content

Please ensure that your forum is aligned with our Term of Services at
all time to avoid any un-wanted situation.

Thank You Very Much.
PHPBBER.COM

So, B77 could be removed WITHOUT WARNING, if "mature content" is discovered on the site during a review.

I really, really think we ought to have a contingency plan for if this happens.

Contingency plan as in: how to notify all members of what happened, and maybe where to meet up at.

Maybe we should start up a mirror board, with everything set up all the same, and just go there if this board happens to evaporate.

edit: and all the work on the Constitutional Convention really ought to be backed up somehow!

Maria, Alandriel is making a Web site where all our charter articles, handbooks, etc., will be available as Web pages and pdf files.

It would probably be a good idea if people knew of some place where we could reconvene, but I think it's far more likely that it will be because of a major phpbber server crash than because we get deleted. We are not a porn board, and given that we're breaking no laws and are their largest single board by a huge margin, I don't think they'll bother us.

I am pretty sure that policy is in place to protect them legally more than to control our content.

A server crash does worry me. Ethel's board recently lost three weeks of posts because her provider was backing up sloppily.

We would lose every single post. This board has never been backed up.

Prim wrote:

I am pretty sure that policy is in place to protect them legally more than to control our content.

That's what I thought when it was just a small statement in the terms of service that you see when you sign up. The fact that they took the time to say it again directly to the administrators and threaten to remove the whole MB without warning is extremely alarming to me.

Did you, as an admin here on B77, get the same message?

I'm glad Alandriel is making copies of all the Charter stuff.

It might be a good idea to have everyone's email address saved somewhere else, so that we could be contacted if the worst happens.

I didn't get the message. As the board's founder, Alandriel is the "owner of record," so I would guess she got it.

MariaHobbit wrote:

So, B77 could be removed WITHOUT WARNING, if "mature content" is discovered on the site during a review.

Have you taken a look through phpbber's smileys? Some of them depict sexual acts and have swearing so I personally am not all that worried about the mature content thing.

Also, we are the largest board by far on phpbber. I think they know about us by now.

The only worrying thing is a server crash.

Shouldn't we seriously consider backing up this board?

phpbber will do it for a $25 fee, as I understand, and I would gladly volunteer to pay it myself.

I never got any message from the phpbb guys

But - re the adult content stuff I would not worry. I'm sure before they would go as far as just taking us offline they would let us know. As to backups - well, even if we purchase a backup at that price it would then only be for that single point in time. A weekly backup would cost us $100.- a month - I don't think that's really feasible at this point in time.

Much more important is that we begin to get a team together to start organizing the b77 dot com site. And that will start being a possibility just once the charter is ratified (with the proposed 'owner' structure).

I know it's hard to be patient - but we'll just have to be. And we will need every single techie we can possibly get plus some funds (voluntary) for getting it going.
_______________
Resident witchâ„¢

Eru - where can one check the size of these boards? That sounds interesting!

I have my own little "playboard" on phpBBer, or used to, and I also got that message to the Admin account of that board.

I think though it is important to have a backup if at least to do it once. We eould not need a weekly backup.

I was on another board that got hacked and we lost 3 days of posts. Everyone was ticked off, but they were glad there was something rather then starting from scratch.

We have all the charter articles saved, on Jny's hard disk I think.

At the moment I shouldn't mind if we were made to start from scratch!

Hmmm.. You have a point.

To say it would be better to start from scratch is not very kind to the RPers, to people who have started long, serious threads, to the Symposium, to anybody who has posted anything in a thread they care about.

We are the community, but what brings us here is what we have to say to each other. If all our history and everything we have ever said to each other vanished overnight, I don't know that all of us would return.

The threads on this board are not expendable.

I'm assuming that "starting from scratch" was not a serious suggestion.

No.
It was something in another thread, that is all.

This is why I was all for getting at least some backup. If we do it now and never again at least we have a jumping off point. Also in case some accidents happen while moving the board to the Board77 URL, we have something to fall back on.

Also just thinking about it it protects us from hackers which I think would be a good thing. Although I do not think anyone would hack, I think it's safe to keep all our bases covered. Hacking really hurts. When the other board I was on got hacked we could not enter the discussion forums.

Well, there was a Winkie! I can see now why Hobby is always wondering why people take her too seriously!

Hobby, if I misunderstood, I certainly apologize.

Winky smilies don't work for me—to me they don't say "I'm kidding" the way does. They say "You know what I mean?"

Guess I'm smilie-impaired.

How hard would it be to snag all the email addresses and copy them over to somewhere else? If an admin does that, at least she or he could email everyone and tell them what happened.

I think we should prepare for the worst and hope for the best, rather than just dismiss the possibility.

Thanks, Alatar!

Hmmh - winking smilies can mean both: I'm not serious and You know what I mean. But, actually, many smilies can mean "I'm not serious", it all depends on the context.
I wouldn't use to say "I'm not serious" (though I've seen it used that way, mostly in unpleasant contexts) - I would mostly use that one to say I find something really funny or I'm really pleased.

Well, in this case the wink did try to say "You know what I mean", but apparently only Wilma knew. It humourously referred to the fact that if the board blew up, at least we wouldn't have to agonise over what to do with dated threads. I thought it was funny. Kind of gallows humor. Not a real alternative.

What saddened me was to read this: If all our history and everything we have ever said to each other vanished overnight, I don't know that all of us would return.

The threads on this board are not expendable.

I thought we were here for the people!
Not for the threads, the board or the things said up to now. In real, spoken conversation, there is no record of what was said, either, and still you don't stop caring about people, just because their words aren't preserved for eternity.
I think that's a very sad point of view.

A sad point of view?

I apologize for my shallowness.

Of course we are here for the people. But some of our members are barely here at all, at this point. They come back to read favorite threads—that is how they connect with the people they care about. If those threads vanish, so might those people.

Many others would not—not you, not me, not probably any of us posting here. It doesn't mean there would be no damage done.