New CBB

Fixed :)

Apparently, Zomp has made a blog post concerning the situation, and it does seem like the situation is only temporary. He isn't saying how long it will take to fix things, though. But considering that he's providing this service completely free of charge and for no discernible personal gain, I really find some people's chutzpah in whining about him not doing stuff fast enough difficult to comprehend.

Back in September, spinnwebe got hacked. Another attack came up in November, though apparently limited to the ZBB, and this was repeated this month.

spinn addressed the first two problems, and I removed the immediate source of the latest attack (in .htaccess). However, the infection must go deeper-- the .htacess file isn't going to hack itself. I'm no security expert and have no experience in fixing such things, nor am I the webmaster here-- spinn is. I can't force spinn to deal with something that is, after all, an annoying interruption to him.

I'd hoped people would be patient about the situation and understand that it's frustrating for all of us. Sadly that isn't the case; some of you have decided that rude demands are the way to go.

This situation, as well as the problems at Almeopedia (also due to hacking), lead me to think that the board can only be satisfactorily run from a website under my own control. Then at least I can start from a hack-free state and have the tools to deal with problems as they come up.

This doesn't really come at a good time-- my parents are in the hospital and I don't really have the income for anything expensive. So, yes, I'm testy when people get bitchy about the free service that doesn't have the fucking avatars where they want them.

It will take some time to set things up. When there's news, I'll post it.

The site seems to work on some browsers, but again this is not a sign that the site is OK; something keeps infecting it. Given that, it seems better to keep the board closed.

Thank you for updating us.

You may or may not be aware that the board is apparently entirely unviewable for everybody except moderators. That being the case, I hope you won't mind me reposting this at the CBB, where people can see it.

As for my own views, I can only re-iterate that I think your actions (flaming, banning, board-closing) were both impolite and disproportionate, and that in particular the policy of collective punishment of the community for the perceived misdeads of the few is greatly troubling.

My sympathies for the situation with your parents, truly. I'm sure we can all sympathise with that, and I hope that community members will take your situation into consideration when deciding whether or not to return. I'm sure you are probably aware of how understandably furious and disappointed many people are at the moment - it is one thing, I think many people feel, to gracefully relinquish thankless responsibilities for which you have volunteered, to no benefit of your own, but it's another to abandon those responsibilities without warning or explanation or obvious reasonable cause, in a way that appears vindictive. Hopefully, most will give the board a second chance.

If you really intend to resurrect the board at some point in the future, I recommend taking two basic steps:
1. redirect the board's address to a holding page that explains that the board is experiencing technical difficulties but that it will return
2. ask spinn to e-mail google to take the address off their blacklist, so that people (particularly any potential newcomers, and those who don't yet know about the places they might go to find other information - apparently there are still quite a few who haven't dared visit the board since the warning came up) aren't scared off permanently, and will consider checking back in the future.

I think these two steps would greatly add to the clarity of the situation and would improve the odds of the forums returning swiftly to health after the reboot.

Regarding the financial situation, you might take the opportunity to discuss options with the community. Perhaps somebody else might have the money, time, and/or expertise to run the forums, or to co-run the forums with you, or to provide more active and secure hosting for the forums. Perhaps a whip-around could be held to help support the financial burden of the forums - I know that sort of thing has worked in other places. Even if things remain as they are, I think that maybe that sort of discussion could make everybody feel better about things - us, because we would feel consulted, involved, kept in the loop, and perhaps you, because it might make you feel less isolated as admin, more supported. Talking about problems is good!

Once again, thank you sincerely for starting to communicate with us again, and my best wishes with your personal and financial situations.

but it's a visible hindrance to those of us who actively use the boards

You can just disable them in your board settings for the time being. But yes, I guess not fixing this minor thing for so long may have led to the impression that neither Zomp nor Spinn really care about board issues for some, including myself.

Especially considering that the fix is literally one checkbox, to allow avatars hosted offsite. Which would also solve the bandwidth problem that IIRC was raised wrt avatars a while before they got broken.

And I was just going to get off my ass and post about a little conmyth program I wanted to test out. Ah well. Maybe if the ZBB is still down when I finish touching it up, I can post it here.

The idea was that you make an index of the conmyth motifs of your conculture like the Aarne-Thompson index, and the program will randomly choose a number of motifs according to various specifications and tunings and the tree structure. I did actually have an idea for a procedural myth generator based on this kind of idea, but this would be more like an aide for writing myths.

That list on Wikipedia reads much like TV Tropes for fairytales Also, I guess you could do random draws from TV Tropes regarding character traits and plot/plot devices?

I see. Sounds interesting enough; What sorts of specifications can be set?