Addressing website concerns

[mojo (Terry)]

To address concerns I've received recently about the forum & site.
We promise, the site has not now or ever been hacked or had viruses. If it was, I would now about it. Promise.

The site, on the other hand, is slow at times. It has nothing to with any of the aforementioned or because the site domain was switched over from .com to .com.au. IceInSpace is still hosted on the same server as before.

Currently IceInSpace shares bandwidth with other sites on the same physical machine. These other sites run some ftp servers which consume the bulk of the bandwidth. Needless to say, it leaves IceInSpace with very little at times. We hope to be on a much faster 25Mbit link in the near future and we'll keep you posted when that happens. Our apologies, but it is totally out of our control at the moment.

I hope that clears up some concerns, anyway.

Could the last one out, turn off the lights tonight.
Cheers.

[davidpretorius]

ftp users hmmph!


icespaces wants http:!!!
icespaces wants http:!!!
icespaces wants http:!!!
icespaces wants http:!!!
icespaces wants http:!!!
icespaces wants http:!!!

thanks MOJO!

[iceman (Mike)]

A few other points to address, just to aleviate any concerns:

1. Most ever users online: 348.

This high number is because a new searchbot of some sort became active one day and trawlled through the site with its little spiders to add the site to its search engine. It's normal for searchbots to do this, and this time there was just more than what you normally see. I'm going to change the number back to what it was previously (41).

2. Guest users doing admin duties (when looking at who's online)

Again, this is due to searchbots. Searchbots just follow links looking for content on pages to add to their search engine index. The searchbots followed a link that is normally reserved for admins/moderators, and therefore they get an error page (same as you would if you tried it). There's nothing malicious happening.

3. All threads being marked as "read" suddenly.

There is a cookie timeout of 15 minutes, so if you open up the forums, maybe read a few threads and go and have a cup of coffee or something, if after 15 minutes you come back and refresh the index page, your "new post" indicators will be gone because the cookie has timed out. That's normal behaviour for this version of vBulletin. In the new version of vBulletin being released in the near future, they will be introducing "real" unread post functionality, so the posts will stay marked as "unread" until you have actually read them (or marked them all as read).

4. Mysterious users signing up

This isn't happening, but to address a concern raised to me about whether it possibly could happen. Those searchbots I talked about, there's also spybots that try to automatically register with some forums so they can do things like email/PM other users and generally spam stuff. This can't happen on the IceInSpace forums due to the Image Verification step that you have to complete as part of the registration. You'll see the same thing when you sign up for yahoo, msn etc. It's to fool those automated registration bots so that they can't actually "read" the graphic and enter the required validation text. So rest assured, all members are real and valid members.


I hope that puts your mind at ease, for anyone worrying about these things.

If you have any other questions, concerns or problems, please feel free to email or PM me and i'll be glad to give you an explanation.

[gaa_ian (Ian)]

Thanks Mike & Mojo, for providing such a proffesional & well thought out service.
Iceinspace must be by now the biggest Astronomy "Club" in Australia.
Keep up the great work !

[davidpretorius]

thanks for details Mike.

I feel for you guys sometimes, I understand that you guys walk a fine line. You are not a huge hosting company with unreal bandwidth or a multi departmented web development multi media company fully dedicated to iis. You and the mods are guys that work on this site for the love of it and do a fantastic job. You also have a career to run and a family to spend time with.

Us users have attached to this forum like my two year old with her toys. That is a great position to be in from a commercial sense! If it is slow, we grumble, but I hope we all remember that your hearts are more into this than ours and that you will always do your best to maintain the environment we have come to love.

Ride with the punches guys. If nothing ever went wrong and us two years olds never complained about our favourite toy, it would mean that either you guys are perfect or that we have all left for another forum and can't be bothered commenting.

Please please keep up the great work (not perfect, but very very close)

[iceman (Mike)]

Thanks for the feedback Ian and Dave, it's nice to hear..

I dunno why but my hobbies turn into obsessions I can't do anything half-hearted and I throw myself into it fully. That's how this website came about I suppose.

It is a labour of love. Everyone's input into the site has been on a voluntary basis, including myself, mojo who helps me out, and of course the moderators. Noone's getting paid or making money out of the site, and it's through donations from generous forum members that we continue to be able to maintain the site for this great community.

We've created something special and unique for the Australasian amateur astronomy community. Sometimes speaking with mojo, we both comment how great it is to see some of the interactions on the forum.. people sharing ideas, sharing their talent and expertise, and working together towards a common goal. It's the community that makes this site what it is, I'm just proud to be able to facilitate that.

So keep up the great work everyone!

[acropolite (Phil)]

Mike, why can't you have a link with a fixed IP and host on your own server?? BTW I have no problem with the speed of the site, sure it's a little slow sometimes, but so is my broadband in general. As I've posted in another thread my broadband is probably only 20% as fast browsing as it was when installed. That's most likely a factor or Bogpond server loading in my area. You could put the stuff at the left and (maybe) the banner in frames so that when various threads are loaded there is less info to load. I know frames are "unfashionable" but they do work. That would also have the advantage that the left menu wouldn't scroll off the screen when scrolling down threads.

[RapidEye]

Originally Posted by acropolite

Mike, why can't you have a link with a fixed IP and host on your own server??

Lots of headaches associated with that idea...
Sure, technically, its easy to do. Building a Linux server and tossing Apache, PHP, and MySQL probably wouldn't take more than a couple of hours.

But checking that the backups ran like they were supposed to every night, trying to keep current on OS and Service patches as they came out. Taking the time to install them (in the middle of the night so as to not impact users), keeping up on the latest server firewall software and configurations, on and on.

Putting a server on the internet for permenant access is a trivial matter these days. Keeping it there, stable, maintained, and locked down is an entirely different matter.

Paying someone to keep up with that full time, IMHO is money well spent!

You guys run a nice site that seems very stable. Once you get the bandwidth stuff hammered out with the host - you'll be gold!