I want to start a discussion about the future of this community and site.

Legitimate traffic has been on the decline for a long time. Attempts to spam the boards also continue to increase.

Up until this year, it hadn't really become a big issue. But earlier this year, use of the report post function ended up resulting in GMail blocking a lot of mail from both this domain, and my personal domain used for email. Basically since the report post function includes the spam, their servers legitimately saw it as a spam message. This is due to many current and former moderators having gmail as their provider.

The other part of this is tied to users using the "notify me of a new post" feature, and also many users here using GMail.

My personal life has also been a roller coaster of stress for about 2 years now. I don't really have the time to try and dig deeper and fix this issue, and have no idea when I will have time. The impact to my personal domain though is getting worse, to the point I couldn't email a friend today. I have no idea how much it impacted my job hunt earlier this year either, but I fear it may have contributed to a few possibilities getting missed.

So I want to figure out how best to handle what is here and how to move forward.

Random ideas, tossing these out to seed more possibilities in the discussion:

Set an end date for the board, and switch it to read only mode after said time. Continue to host it for a number of years to keep the information available.

Upgrade the server to adhere to modern mail practices that help establish more trust between mail senders. I'm not sure if this is going to clear up my personal domain issues with GMail.

Have someone else take over and host the community. I'd probably still be willing to keep ownership of the FAQ hosting and such on the riocar.org side.


Curious what others have as ideas as well. This community remains important to me, but I'm feeling it may be time to fade into the background as many others have already.

I think a very simple thing to try, is disable new memberships. I suspect doing that would reduce the spam to near zero, wouldn't it?

Were this board to close, I'd be heartbroken. No doubt about it. And I do lack the expertise to take it on in your place.

Thanks.
Mark

My first inclination was to volunteer. My second was to remember the admonitions from my spouse and my therapist that I have a tendancy to overcommit, and so everything gets the short shrift.
'
If things are read-only, there will be no email. So... why not leave it but don't send email?

Edit: or what Mark suggested?

I'd hope that Mark's idea is workable. It'd be too bad to shut out any new legitimate Empeg enthusiasts. But really and truly they must be few and far at this point.

I don't post all that often, but I certainly follow the discussions here. This really is a nice little corner of the Internet.....

I'm one of those that are mostly lurking in the background and don't post much. I also think it would be a very sad day if this forum was shut down.

Wouldn't it be possible to change the code to not include the spam in the report post? Not knowing how much is involved, I would guess it would be just a 5-minute job... I assume a link to the post is already included so the actual spam shouldn't be needed.

That is what I've done on a forum I host, it eliminated spam completely.

I'd be happy to take over the hosting of http://empegbbs.com/ , I already host the other forum I mentioned and there is plenty of spare capacity on the Linode instance I use for that. If I did host it though, I'd almost certain close it to new members (or at least automatically signed up new members).

Likewise! I don't post much these days, but still check the forum daily - and rely on it for help in case I run into issues with my 4 empegs and 7 rio receivers still in use...

Nthing the disable new signups suggestion. Failing that, if the impact on your personal domain is due to sharing an IP address, you could maybe use a dedicated IP for the board to quarantine it?

I think this is the best course of action. The information on this forum would still be available to the (unlikely) person just getting into empegs, and the old-timers would still be able to converse.

Another option, which would put extra burden on the moderators, would be to approve new members and first X number of posts.

drakino,
Thanks for all your work over the years in hosting this forum. I very much appricate this little corner of the internet, and will morn its passing when that comes, which hopefully will not be for some time.
David

If EmpegBBS went away, I would probably cry more than when either of my parents died.

I agree with the disabling new memberships as well, with the caveat that there be some way of contacting a moderator with a photo of an Empeg serial number or something like that should someone pick up a unit on Ebay and have a question or two.

I too still check the BBS a couple times a week and often search for some obscure topic that I know has been discussed here before to get answers to questions I have.

I guess if worst comes to worst, you could make it read only and move any discussion to a Facebook group or some such abomination.

I'm truly sorry about your email problems. My email address has been sullied also by being a blog/forum/host administrator. This makes my current circumstances where I depend on email communication to fund raise for the ministry work I do difficult. In the end, I've offloaded all of my email sending to Mailchimp and set up a special forwarding address for the sender/reply-to so that my personal address will stay clean.

Another suggestion is that it should be extremely simple to comment out the bit of code where it includes the spam message in the flagged post.

I vote for the closing to new memberships as well. Perhaps something on the signup page could point potential new members to a moderator's Twitter account or something? I'm just trying to think of the unlikely event that we'd gain a member.

It would be foolish to deny that there's a natural decline to this board. I can't imagine it will be around for forever. Still, it would be nice to hang on to it for as long as we can!

Looking back, I did modify the report post to only e-mail me in early September.

What's frustrating is that the bulk of what would irritate GMail servers happened early in this year. I would have hoped the decline in e-mail would have cleared it up. I don't even know where to start to try and contact someone at Google, nor do I have any faith any attempt to do so would lead anywhere.

Their web page does have a number of suggestions for bulk e-mail senders. Problem is, this site really isn't a bulk e-mail sender. Having any sort of clarity on why it was flagged would help me resolve things. The e-mail to a friend didn't have anything suspicious in it to my eyes. And the same e-mail went through fine when I sent it via my iCloud account, instead of my personal domain.

I may migrate to someone else to host my personal mail. Problem is doing so will require me to change my way of using e-mail entirely. More things to ponder when mythical time to do so appears

Some quick stats to show the signup issue:

The highest user ID number right now is 6221. IDs 6217-6222 all registered after my thread creation, and are all obvious spam accounts that still got past the spam checker. Earlier this year I started deleting spam accounts after upgrading the boards to have spam checking against StopForumSpam.com. Any gaps in IDs is from users being deleted.

The most recent legitimate user is ID 6187 from 10/31. That user even posted once, attracted to one of Tony's threads. 6187-6217 shows 30 accounts since 10/31, a slow time.

Expanding to the past year, a legitimate user signed up and posted on 10/25/13 with user ID 5189. 21 legitimate accounts exist between ID 5189 and 6187. Leaving 977 spam accounts over the past year.

The effort to mass delete the accounts isn't too bad, but due to the admin UI, a single misclick is all it takes to wipe all users. I did this once last year.

So, with that said, some downsides I see to turning off new user signups to consider:

1. No new users can register to participate in the for sale area of the board.
2. No new users can register to participate in the many off topic technical support threads here. Several of these threads still hover high in Google search results.
3. No new users can sign up to lurk, and have the boards track their read and unread threads across devices.

Last night my post was written while being under the negative effects of my stress. That stress is leading me to look to shed anything I can to reduce what I need to deal with day to day. A discussion tonight about one of the top stressors may help.

This community matters enough to me that I want to find a path to keep it going. And I appreciate the discussion here so far. Right now, Andy's offer to host the site may be a path I consider, but its also tied up in what I decide to do with the mail server I run. Much of why this site is still hosted by me is the fact that is is relatively light weight, and the out of pocket expense has been justifiable. Especially after supporting this community enabled me to meet several of you in person during my motorcycle adventure 2 years ago.

I do want to reassure people I'm taking this very seriously, and understand the extent that people value this site. Backups are performed daily of the core database, and every few hours the entire server is also backed up.

Again thank you for the kind words and statements showing how much this place means to each one of you.

Chiming in late here, I agree that a more heavyweight new-account process is the path of least resistance, and I wouldn't particularly mind if the email features went away entirely. I too keep a tab open to visit here once a day or so to see what's up.

While there are plenty of alternatives should empegbbs.com go away (e.g., G+ groups, Facebook groups, etc.), we'd lose even more people in the transition. I'd suggest that we don't want to go there yet. Another alternative might be professional hosting. I have no idea whether ubbforum.com, ubbcentral.com, or any of the others are any good or what they charge, but they *are* out there.

I too check in here fairly often, even though I have never met any member in person. One of the nicer spots on the Internet, this is.

If money might provide options to ease the way forward, I would be willing to contribute. No idea how much would be enough, or if that is even a useful thing to suggest.

I honestly didn't even know there were email features to alert me of new posts. I wouldn't usually suggest removing a feature just because I don't use it, but if it's causing that many problems it might be the best thing.


I don't keep a tab open, but the site is featured prominently in my bookmarks bar as you can see in the attached image. I do visit here constantly throughout the day.

Count me as a regular who would really miss this site were it to go away.

I have a different, yet still annoying, mail problem with my board: some admin messages are sent from the board with a gmail address as the reply-to. Every now and then, a recipient's mail service (yahoo and aol most often) will reject it, and sometimes my gmail deems it spam.

As to forum spam, my board poses one of a few (on-topic yet obscure) questions to registrants to keep spambots out, and it works pretty well. For the several a day who clear that hurdle, I check IP and email to see if they show as spammers and only a small fraction do. More common are the almost-on-topic folks trying to use us to advertise their sites.

-jk

AOL is, by far, the worst company at handling spam.

If AOL has deemed that you are a spammer, they will completely block your email from every single user in their network. I have about a dozen clients with AOL addresses (who do you think is the most likely person to need computer support?), and I am completely unable to send them email. That includes my personal GMail address, my company address, and (most importantly for me) my invoicing service (which sends emails addressed from my domain).

When I send email to someone on AOL, the message simply never gets there. It doesn't show up in their spam folder and nobody gets alerted that this has happened. It simply goes off into the ether. Like Tom with Google, I don't know how I'd go about addressing this problem.

The worst part is, every time I see the inbox of an AOL user, it's simply chock full of spam email.

I hate you, AOL.

Anyway, sorry for taking this off-topic. I would offer to take over the board but I know I don't have the first clue of how to run it properly. I ran a phpBB on my own site about a decade ago, and even though it only had about six people on it (my friends), it was still a chore to maintain and I didn't have half the diligence that Tom shows in backing this whole thing up.

I still check here daily to see what's up, I'd miss it if it's gone.

I just spent a week in the hospital, and in that time, there were 39 new posts, 21 of which are this thread.

It seems that eliminating email notices completely would be easy and it's not such a big deal to just come here and check. Disabling new members and providing an email for legit requests also seems a good idea.

Something else I've been thinking lately is maybe change the focus of the site. I'm down do one MkI languishing in a drawer somewhere and for years the off topic forum is the mainstay of this BBS. I'm thinking that maybe changing it to a projects oriented BBS where we can all discuss what ever we're all currently working on would be interesting and add life here again.

I miss coming here and reading up on what others of similar intellect are up to. Pretty much I only come here, a particular car bbs, and FB. The vapid musings of the other two sites leave me feeling like I've had a lobotomy.

If I'm a little incoherent here, I'm sorry. I'm still a bit spacy from my hospital stay.

Wow, I don't read this board for 2 days (this almost never happens!), and this is the result.

Reading up on Tom's first post I can understand it fully. But to be honest, I never even knew there was an option to be sent an email for every new response in a thread. I've always visited the forum an a daily basis and then just read the new posts. No biggie, and I don't need an email to remind me of that. So for all I care, this feature may very well be turned off. (other may feel differently about this, but this is my opinion).

Also, I'm all for it to just close the new registrations. Maybe leave an opening so that new wannabe members can send an email to an Admin or Mod who can then accept this new membership (or not). With the (unfortunate) decline in applications of new (real) members, I can't imagines this would be a big workload.

That said, I really hope this place never disappears. I's been a comfortable little corner of the internet for me, for more than 13 years now (that's more than one third of my life!)
I would be very saddened seeing it go.

I too am so thankful for all the hard work Tom does to keep this slice of heaven going. I have been able to get my empeg repaired and items replaced thru the bbs, and, hopefully will be able to continue to do so. After all, where else could a person search for a sled? It is a rare item even on ePay!

Thanks again, Tom, whatever path you choose, and if you ever stop by 'The Springs' again, I'll have you over for lunch!

As I read everyone posts here, I smile as I could have posted many of them. As I open my browser(s), a tab with the EmpegBBS opens all the times. It's been like that for years now, and even when I don't even have time to click on it and read, I need to see the Empeg BBS icon up there, every day. So many things have changed in my life, and yet the Empeg BBS has always been there, in front of me, in the office, every day.

Guys, I find myself bragging about being part of one of the nicest and smartest corners of the internet, this BBS, possibly just as much as being one of the people of the times of the Fidonet BBS .

I just want to add myself to the list of those who will be willing to help. I could host the site too, but my expertise is more on the .net / Microsoft side of things.
I know there's probably better expertise and offers to help already, Drakino, but, should you want to, feel free to contact me and we can discuss in details the extent to which I can help.

Also, I'd be happy to contribute economically if you should prefer any other solution that has a $ impact on managing the board and addressing its issues.

I too agree that even disabling completely the email features of the Empeg BBS would be perfectly fine for me, and , I guess, for most of us. In general, if disabling all email features would allow new members to join, I'd go that venue.

In any way, thank you so much Drakino. Not entirely sure how, but if I can help, I'll happily do so.

it would be a shame to lose access to this valuable BBS. I check it almost daily and enjoy the community members and the useful exchange of information about Empegs and other information.

Ross

Switching to the moderated user queue so far has worked decently. I can check it when I feel I have the free time to do so, instead of seeing Gmail bounces and the need to immediately respond to a spam problem here. I'll post some information in the admin only section here soon so that the other admins can help out.

Long term, I still haven't come to a decision, and will think it through more this month. Andy, thank you again for being willing to possibly take this over. I am giving it serious consideration. For now, would you be willing to step onboard as another community admin?

Personal side, stress levels are getting a little better. I'm tuning out a little bit of the negative parts, thanks in part to the twitter auto blocker I use. Some of the stress recently has been from the current drama going on in video games. It started to make several peoples lives hell right during the time frame I was interviewing places to rejoin the industry. I'm hesitant to even discuss much of it here, just to avoid the possibility being targeted and watching this community get hacked over it.

You're awesome. Thanks for continuing to be an awesome BBS admin.

That sounds almost ominous! As an admin for a fairly large online community, I'd love to hear more about your issues - if you're in a position to share.

-jk