Service Announcements

I upgraded the software for the discussion forums yesterday and noticed at least two new bugs. The problem I was correcting was on the database side and transparent to visitors, the database problem has been corrected but the user interface (the stuff you see) has a few bugs. There is a lot of behind the scenes activity required to keep this beast of a website running. I have not had time to follow up with the software developer's technical support but will I do so as soon as possible. I apologize to the inconvenience.

I finally resolved all of the bugs from the software upgrade I performed last week. This software is actually quite good and offers loads of features unavailable on popular social media platforms.

This discussion forum went down shortly after 8 a.m. Eastern, and was restored around 8 p.m. It seems my Blog was bombarded by attempts to log into my admin account. The this barrage of attempts caused to to exceed the allocation of resources allocated to me by my web host. Which essentially brought down anything that uses a database, my Blog, large sections of the site and of course this discussion forum. It really never ends. A bunch of IP address were blocked and I installed a plugin on my wordpress blog called wordfence. Basically it will block any IP address that attempts multiple failed login's. This should prevent this problem from reoccurr…

In the 22 years of running a discussion forum. I have never had two outages which have lasted more a day in three month period. The Details On Saturday afternoon while waiting for a flight I decided to upgrade the discussion forum's website software using my cell phone. Now a few years ago this would have been unthinkable, but today I can do quite a bit from my cell phone -- even some development. Unfortunately, during the upgrade my firewall halted the upgrade because it did not recognize my IP Address -- a great security measure, which requires me to whitelist the IP address I'm currently using. The problem is my cell phone, for some reas…

I'm changing the look and feel of AALBC.com. The design is being worked on here: https://aalbc.com/template2018.php (this is a work in progress but is substantially how the new design will appear. As a result, I'm changing the look of these discussion forums to match AALBC new look. The discussion forums is third party code, so I what I can change and how I make those changes is a mission of discovery and somewhat of a challenge right now. Please bear with me as I experiment with settings and try to get this done as quickly as I can. Thanks, Troy

First I'd like to thank everyone who reported the most recent spam attack. A troll has made it his (mostly likely a young white guy, if I were to profile), mission to trash our forum here with extremely vulgar, obscene and racist photos. This particular troll is pretty aggressive and determined. They have spammed the board on more than one occasion. In the most recent case, they created multiple accounts then spammed the board in what I will call a cluster attack. This resulted in hundreds of vulgar images appearing across multiple conversations simultaneously. Some of the accounts were active, but lying dormant, long before the attack before …

I apologize for the inconvenience. I was performing a routine upgrade to the forum's software and a change on my web host side caused the upgrade to fail midway. I was not able to remedy the problem until this morning.

One reason I don't read as much as I'd like to, or should, is that most of my time is spent maintaining the website. Over the last few days I'm been making a number of improvements to the site and dealing with a hack. The first change is that I've set up AALBC.com to use a CDN, which is basically a set of globally distributed servers to help spend up the website. During this transition there may have been some anomalous behavior on the website at least one user has reported that a problem they previously observed has gone away. The site was also hacked. Anytime you use third party software (like this discussion forum), or wordpress (used for my …

I spent the better part of the last 24 hours trying to sort of the problem with this discussion forum. Very painful because, of course, had better thing to do, than deal with the finger pointing between the software vendors and web host, and the technical challenges of getting the discussion forum back up without losing data. I suspect I may have compromised the forum by installing a rogue script (obtained from the vendors support forum) to correct a relatively minor problem with the emoticons not working properly. There were hundred of extra files. in fact so many more that they exceeding the site of the entire website to the point my websites billed me at a rate of 7 …

Hey as i dispense impromptu English lessons, relate the adverse impact of corporate domination of the WWW, argue over the meaning of race, gender roles, and everything in between. Never get it twisted. y'all are my peeps and I have Nothing but love for ya'll!

You can learn more about the upgrade here: https://invisioncommunity.com/news/

AALBC.com is experiencing database server problems. As a result, large sections of the website are unavailable (it's always something). All advertisers will have their campaigns extended for twice the duration of the outage I tell you dealing hackers, trolls, and corporate domination of the web. Running an indie website can be a real drag sometimes... I was outgrowing my current web host a needed to move anyway, this might be a good time to do it. Keep me in your prayers.

After a 2.5 day outage, The website is back up! I've moved the site to a new server, and I can already see that the discussion forum is faster. Let me know if you see any other problems. While the site has been up for several hours, I only gained access a few minutes ago (information relating to the new location of AALBC.com does not reach all corners of the world wide web at the same time), and I have quite a few things to check out before I call it a day.

Thanks for the messages about the spammers. I can't monitor the forum 24 hours a day. These guys are smart enough to know when I go to bed to post their messages. The account they used was created sometime ago when I was much less aggressive rejecting new accounts. Sort of like sleeper accounts, laying in the cut waiting to pounce.

You may notice that I've migrated the discussion forum to use SSL, basically make the site secure by encrypting the date better your computer and our web server. Historically this was typically done on eCommerce websites, but there is a growing movement to make the entire web secure. I think this is a good idea. So far everything looks pretty good, but as with any changes things can get wonky.

As of March 31st 2010 only registered users may post on the AALBC.com discussion boards. The easiest way to register is to use you Facebook account (facebook connect). You facebook credentials are not shared with AALBC.com. Facebook just provides the ability to use their validation to logon to other websites, like our discussion baord. Of course you may also register to particpate without a facebook account.

As of march 31st 2010. Users not have the ability to delete their own posts. They however will notbe able to dleete topics they have started if other have already posted.

There was a problem with the discussion forum's database which caused pages on this forum not to display correctly or at all under certain conditions. I just now corrected the problem.

AALBC's website server has been upgraded! The discussion forums, blogs, and clubs are now ready for full, unrestricted, use! I truly apologize apologize for the inconvenience due to the two week outage caused by the tremendous increase in traffic. Peace, Troy

I plan to migrate this discussion forum to a new webserver. This change is part of the AALBC.com upgrade. For the last couple of months I'v been maintaining two versions of this website AALBC.com and AALBC.org. This is starting to become problematic for me. In a world where I have all the resources I needed to do the website upgrade properly, I would be able manage both sites make the switch to the new version of AALBC.com virtually seemless, sort of like flipping a switch. Alas, this poor webmaster does not have that luxury, so I've decided to simply point everything to the new version of AALBC.com. This means for several months the website will dis…

It took all day but we are back up. I also moved he rest of AALBC.com to an entirely new web server too. Man, there are a lot of moving parts to this website. But the cool thing about moving is that you get to clean things up a bit and ditch some unneeded baggage. I still have a ton of work to complete the upgrade but this was big milestone. There are of course residual problems like broken avatars from Facebook. If you notice anything else please email me or post the problem on one of the forums. Thanks Right now I have to figure out why my books ads are not displaying...

I'm doing my best to remedy them.