2381

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: "newbie", "jr. member"

« on: December 03, 2013, 06:18:20 PM »

I share my lemonyness with all. I am a benevolent lemon.

There's no need to get sour about it.

2382

Announcements / Re: Help wanted to make this place better

« on: December 03, 2013, 05:43:24 PM »

Any of you kindly volunteers feel like writing an introductory blog post for the FES homepage? I seem to have contracted writer's block.

This is going to be the first thing RE noobs see when they look at our new site, so choose your words carefully if you take on this task.

2383

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: "newbie", "jr. member"

« on: December 03, 2013, 05:38:03 PM »

Gone.

Still have a yellow square.

It's because you're a lemon.

2384

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: "newbie", "jr. member"

« on: December 03, 2013, 05:34:03 PM »

Gone.

2385

Announcements / Server timezone changed

« on: December 03, 2013, 05:26:16 PM »

I have changed the server timezone to UTC, which should get rid of those pesky jumps when daylight savings starts or ends in a specific timezone. This will mean that if you had already set your time offset, you will need to set it again. The trade-off is that, since UTC doesn't jump around, you won't need to set it again after that (except when DST changes for you -- hopefully I can find a way to make that work properly for everyone).

2386

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Use CloudFront for serving static content

« on: December 03, 2013, 04:56:43 PM »

I've had a chance to think about this a bit, and Amazon is definitely the best fit for our needs. I'll move our DNS across to Route 53 in the coming days, which will allow me to begin working on setting up CloudFront.

2387

Announcements / Re: Comments wanted: Switching domain to tfes.org

« on: December 03, 2013, 04:55:51 PM »

Are the posts here going to transfer to tfes.org, or are the posts going to start from scratch again?

All content, including the posts, will remain the same. Only the domain will change.

2388

Suggestions & Concerns / Get a StartSSL wildcard SSL certificate

« on: December 03, 2013, 03:38:07 PM »

Yep, another reminder thread. It'd be nice to have the option of HTTPS on FES.

2389

Announcements / Re: Comments wanted: Switching domain to tfes.org

« on: December 03, 2013, 03:23:30 PM »

Given all the links we've posted on .org, though, we should make sure that the current URL redirects to tfes.org.  We don't want anyone following a dead link and getting confused.

That goes without saying. I'm not Daniel.

2390

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Use CloudFront for serving static content

« on: December 03, 2013, 02:56:11 PM »

CloudFlare would be another option, but I have some reservations. It would have some additional benefits (both for performance and security) over CloudFront, though, so I'll look into that option further before making a decision.

Edit: One of the performance benefits of CloudFlare could be equally satisfied with Amazon's Route 53 DNS service, so now I'm torn again.

2391

Announcements / Comments wanted: Switching domain to tfes.org

« on: December 03, 2013, 02:40:24 PM »

Junker has kindly given me control of the tfes.org domain name, and I'm thinking of switching to it as our primary name. The main advantage is that it's shorter, although uncommon domain names sometimes scare people for inexplicable reasons too.

Specifically, we would have:

forum.tfes.org -- This forum.
wiki.tfes.org -- Flat Earth Wiki.
library.tfes.org -- Flat Earth Library.
www.tfes.org -- Homepage (CMS/blog, still being set up).
tfes.org -- Redirect to the forum, but probably eventually to the CMS/blog.

Any comments/suggestions? This is as much your site as it is mine, so I don't want to make a unilateral decision here.

2392

Suggestions & Concerns / Set up server monitoring

« on: December 03, 2013, 02:24:47 PM »

Again, just a reminder for myself. Ideally I'd set up my own monitoring system, but for a website this small, New Relic will do nicely.

2393

Announcements / Intention to set up CMS homepage

« on: December 03, 2013, 02:00:50 PM »

I already posted this in The Lounge, but it can't hurt to put it in Announcements too:

In the long term, I want to work things out with Daniel in some way that does not compromise the running of this forum. This may mean that he continues to run the CMS site, while the forum and wiki live here.

In the short term, Daniel's constant absence makes negotiating with him impossible, so we're going to try and drive more traffic to this site. I don't take this decision lightly, as I would rather not make an enemy of the powers that be on .org, but I'm going to begin working on a homepage similar to .org's CMS so we can hopefully improve our Google ranking. Without RE noobs, there will be no debates, and this website will fail.

It's going to be tough walking the line between alienating us from the .org administration and doing too little to boost popularity, and I will undoubtedly be pissing someone off, somewhere. I would appreciate any and all opinions people have to offer in the next few days.

Finally, I'd like to thank you all for posting here. I've been frustrated by the situation on .org for a very long time, mostly because I know I can do things better, so I appreciate the chance to run this site properly. I hope I don't let you down.

I've done some initial setup of a CMS called BlazeBlogger to begin with:

http://cms.theflatearthsociety.sjm.so/

It's just got a test post up at the moment, but with some custom theming it could be a decent homepage. It's also very efficient at generating and serving pages; once it's up and running, I want to serve the entire CMS through CloudFront for insanely fast loading times, since the entire blog is static content once it's generated.

Anyway, that's just me being a computer nerd. For the rest of you, suffice it to say we'll have a homepage that isn't the forum soon.

2394

Suggestions & Concerns / Use CloudFlare for serving static content

« on: December 03, 2013, 01:49:08 PM »

Another reminder thread for myself, this time to set up the Amazon CloudFront CDN to serve static files, like CSS and images. This should dramatically improve page load times for people not living near California, especially if we configure SMF to force all avatars to not be externally hosted.

2395

Announcements / Re: What this forum stands for

« on: December 03, 2013, 11:29:20 AM »

Fuck you, my good sir. You are a god damn faggot, I must say. Now good day to you, sir!

Respectful like this?

Yes, but please keep the throwaway insults to the lower fora. We still have standards to maintain up here in Announcements.

2396

Announcements / Re: What this forum stands for

« on: December 03, 2013, 09:20:05 AM »

Am I still allowed to express if I hate someone? Because I really hate Thork. Fuck him.

This forum isn't going to enforce being all goody two-shoes. I don't think anyone here wants that. As long as you keep it within reason and are respectful, that's fine.

2397

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Unresolved DNS server name

« on: December 03, 2013, 01:45:36 AM »

All of the authoritative name servers for sjm.so are responding correctly to queries for theflatearthsociety.sjm.so. This sounds to me like a problem at your workplace, but if you are able to gather any more detail (such as which name is unresolved), I might be able to investigate further.

2398

Announcements / Re: Help wanted to make this place better

« on: December 02, 2013, 11:25:08 PM »

Parsifal, if your goal isn't to make this the "new" fes then how will we get enough new members on this site to have any sort of new FET discussion?

Sorry, I missed this post before. I think you've misinterpreted what I said. I want this to be the best possible FES forum (and wiki) it can be. However, I am not aiming to take over the Society part of things -- all the background stuff Daniel does that doesn't pertain in any way to our online community.

2399

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: "newbie", "jr. member"

« on: December 02, 2013, 11:21:40 PM »

I dont like these titles, I am no newbie and, since this forum is all about fairness and being welcoming to members we should abolish these derogatory titles. 

This is the way SMF does things by default. I agree, it's retarted. I just haven't gotten around to getting rid of it yet.

2400

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Technical Issue?

« on: December 02, 2013, 11:20:27 PM »

That was me being an utter idiot. Won't happen again <3

I trusted you, man.