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Would you look at that? Apparently Apache has been fialing with the URL rewriting for the hours I was offline.

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Optimized the site and cleaned out a bunch of old, unused files. I moved the site back over to our old host since the uptime at Host2x has improved greatly with a new server. In addition, we should be able to fully take advantage of our co.cc domain.


In addition, the URLs are all prettyfied for Search Engine Optimization.

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When viewing the forum, the server will check 10 different conditions to check if you are using a proxy. This is to prevent banned members from re-registering and spambots from using different proxies to carry out operations (after a spambot posted something random about dissertations).


Please note that this may also block:

• School/office (corporate) internet connections
• Old browsers (that do not support compression or encoding)
• Cell phones

I have tested this on Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer and they have not been blocked, but ProxEasy and HideMyAss have been blocked successfully.

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While our co.cc domain is restored, here are some alternates:

• afdes.tk -- redirect to index
• afdes-wiki.tk -- redirect to wiki
• theafdes.ismywebsite.com -- long and rambly one
• afdes.2x.nu -- redirects you to index

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With 25 hours of downtime this month alone, I am moving the site to IsMyWebsite effective ASAP. You will see a small IMW button on the portal as this is a requirement, but as it is only required to show on the main page, it should not affect your forum experience in any way.

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I've created a topic in the private AFDES boards for members to post what they think on a new requests method that has been added as a part of the RC2 upgrade. (and you may have noticed, the old theme is working again  )


Anywho, unless the members give dominantly negative feedback, please use the membership application form (click) to make a request for observership.

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Added Functionality

• You may run more than one poll in a single topic.
• Forms can be sorted into organized topics
• New theme ("Curve")
• Indexed queries for better performance
• Load balancing
• Reorganized menus
• Marquee scrolls up (in development)
• [ you ] tag (no spaces) shows viewer's username (ex: )
• New smiley sets

Removed/Altered Functionality

• AvatarOnBoard removed
• Advanced Reputation removed
• Got rid of some old packages no longer in use
• Reputation is no longer post-based -- if it were, it's not much of a reputation system
• Old theme (Noize) is available, but may cause display issues

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First up, I cleaned up our account to make space for wiki uploads and other stuff. I hadn't done this for a long, long, long, LONG time, but I figured I'd do it today. The results were shocking. (pardon if I'm starting to sound like one of those "Tip to white teeth!" banners)

I found a 400 MB error log in the chat folder and a 100 MB copy of the site in a folder nobody even has access to anyhow. With the combined deletion of both of those areas, you all now have an extra 500 MB of free space for wiki uploads. Go nuts. (actually, don't go nuts, we don't want to gain all that extra weight around AGAIN). We are now using ~200 MB of our allocated 1 GB of space.

I've also changed the smiley set to that of a contest winner over at the SMF site. I'm playing around with it to see how it looks, and if I don't like it after a while, I'll change it back to the default. (unless everyone else says so)

Another big cleanout was in the database. I've removed leftover database tables from stuff we don't need, got rid of the AFD/Points mod and cleaned out a whopping 15 MB error log in the database as well. (Seriously, what the hell is up with those errors?)

And to bore you all to death, I'll tell you some statistics I found in the control panel for the site:

• We had almost 4,000 UNIQUE visitors in the month of August!
• We had 2,900 last month.
• We used the most bandwidth (2.5 GB) last month. I don't know how.
• The pages on our site have gotten 2,016,696 hits altogether from June to today.
• We've been crawled by robots 300,000 times this year.

And from the forum stats panel:

• Male to Female ratio continues to be 1:0
• Average page views per day: ~382
• 119,425 total page views
• Paul has spent the most time online, followed by myself, Anthony, Kenneth and Connor, respectively.

Finally, the topic I've wanted to talk about the most and make you wait for, I've gotten two .tk TLDs that redirect to the main site and wiki.

• http://afdes.tk -- redirects to the forum.
• http://afdes-wiki.tk -- redirects to the wiki.

These are only main page redirectors. You can't use them for urls like afdes.tk/something

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Our host has migrated our servers to a new datacenter, which has caused several posts to go AWOL. As soon as a backup from the old server is ready, the old posts will be restored.

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There is now an upgrade to the forum software coming November 28th at 11:30 AM. It is to upgrade to SMF 2.0 RC2, which is not available to the public yet, but donators. This also gives me some time to prepare for the upgrade, which will also add a new default theme named "Curve."

The site may be down for several hours at most, since the mods will need to be uninstalled and reinstalled. The fallback forum will be available in the meantime to avoid disruption for AFDES members. Hopefully it does not interfere with any summits.

I might be able to reduce the time to upgrade by automating the process, but that is highly unlikely. I do have some code I've been working on, though, but I cannot start full development on the script until the upgrade is released.

In the event the release is delayed, the forum will be upgraded during my Christmas vacation (generally around December 21st through the 27th).

Time left 'til upgrade: Nothing important