2421

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.

2422

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.

2423

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.

2424

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.

2425

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.

2426

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.

2427

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.

2428

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.

2429

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.

2430

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.

2431

Announcements / Re: Help wanted to make this place better

« on: December 02, 2013, 11:08:34 PM »

Thanks for that, Thork. I'll read over it in more detail later and edit as needed. There are considerably more rules there than I had in mind.

2432

Suggestions & Concerns / Bug tracker

« on: December 02, 2013, 12:49:16 PM »

This thread is to remind myself to set up a proper bug tracker in lieu of S&C. A web forum is terrible at tracking issues with the forum.

There will still be a support forum for non-technical users who do not know how to file a bug report.

2433

Announcements / Re: Help wanted to make this place better

« on: December 02, 2013, 12:44:30 PM »

What about John and Daniel?

They won't be admins, but by all means invite them.

2434

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Quick-Search Bar

« on: December 02, 2013, 12:22:38 PM »

I've had a brief look over the theme, but this CSS is frustratingly difficult to grok, and user-interfacey stuff isn't really my area of expertise. I'll hopefully have more time to look at it later in the week and work out what's wrong; for now, you can use the normal search function.

2435

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: donate button

« on: December 02, 2013, 11:10:27 AM »

I honestly doubt we'll ever need income to run this site at all. Heck, I'm paying for a server identical to the one this forum is running on and I pretty much just use it to greet people. These things are pretty cheap, and there is free (gratis, lol) software out there that does pretty much everything we could possibly want to do better than paid-for stuff.

Agreed. I was simply addressing squevil's suggestion in a hypothetical situation where that becomes the case.

2436

Announcements / Re: Help wanted to make this place better

« on: December 02, 2013, 11:05:30 AM »

Should I invite the old admins like Jack and Wilmore?

Please do. Everyone is welcome, if they choose to join.

Not as admins!

Wilmore will have a place as admin here, if he chooses to take it. He has a good head on his shoulders and has done some great things for FET.

2437

Technology & Information / Re: The Flat Earth Society official IRC chat

« on: December 02, 2013, 05:52:37 AM »

I can't install mIRC because I'm missing "msvcp110.dll," whatever the fuck that is.

Microsoft Windows, ladies and gentlemen.

2438

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: donate button

« on: December 02, 2013, 01:57:16 AM »

I presumed you were paying for the space.

If it ever becomes necessary to source funding from the users of FES, it will be through strictly voluntary donations, and perhaps merchandise. No special forum status will be granted to those who donate; I'm not interested in creating a divide between the rich and the poor. And there will never be any advertising on this website.

2439

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: donate button

« on: December 02, 2013, 12:33:36 AM »

some really nice forum software like vbulletin

You must be joking, right?

and cover any hosting costs etc.

This forum is hosted on my personal VPS. It costs me nothing other than time to maintain, since the VPS would exist either way.

Its not a crime to make money to invest back to the society.

If the society ever needs a monetary investment, I'll keep that in mind.

2440

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: donate button

« on: December 02, 2013, 12:26:10 AM »

I will not monetise this website. T-shirts and the like, perhaps if we are successful here. But I won't make money out of people who simply want to post, through donations, advertising or any other means.