PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

[TheCotMan]

Before dedicated social networking sites, forums were "the places" for people, and they would join many forums for each interest. Before forums, there were mailing lists and USENET, and before mailing lists and USENET, there were dial-up BBS. Each "generation" of social networking has decreased the cost for users to enter, and optimized their time. Now with Facebook, and so many people on it, a single-sign-in makes staying on FaceBook (or other networks) easier, and end-users are able to manage their own social contacts. (Facebook and linkedin both integrate sign-on support (to their network) to allow tweets of activities to be proxied through them, helping retain the single-sign-on -- the MS model: embrace and extend.)

Most forums (mailing lists and BBS) rely on moderators to be the deciders of "acceptable" for the masses, and moderators are guaranteed to exclude content someone wants to read, or include content someone does not want to read, while sites like FaceBook empower users to each decide on their own what they want to read and not want to read or see with explicit controls, and then exploit human behaviour by trying to estimate what other content they may like by analyzing their history and providing pseudo-random selected content they may also enjoy, and then use their "clicks" to confirm and lack of "clicks" to enhance the searches for content users may also like. FaceBook decentralizes moderation to the masses, empowering each individual to decide -- effectively moderate their own content.

The idea of separate, dedicated forums as a place to visit for each specialization is something most people are not really looking to accept anymore. This is one of the reasons for the move to the new forum software, which supports integration with FaceBook. As far as I know, it is still planned. The previous hardware was not up to supporting the new forum software, and there were security concerns. Now that we have upgraded to new hardware, we are still looking at what it would take to integrate forums to work more easily with FaceBook.

Fewer and fewer percentages of people even know about these or any other forums. Many that have used forums associate forums with toxic environments of flaming, and prejudice. In the end, forums must change or become obsolete. The question is, which change is the best route? Projections with our previous path were abysmal. Biggest complaints:
* Waiting period is too long
* Yet another login to remember
* Poor mobile support
* History of many forums being toxic, or harmful especially to new users

DT decided we needed to scrap the waiting period, so first complaint was addressed. This increased spam (as we see) and incidents with abuse, but we expected these as a costs.

DT decided to upgrade to the new version, and has people working to support a better style/theme for mobile users: The new version of forum software (with all its bugs) has a much better opportunity for coding a more mobile friendly version of the forums. The present mobile version of the forums is MUCH better than the older one before the major upgrade.

With FaceBook integration, we can partly address the "too many sign-ons" complaint, but only for FaceBook users.

I've tried to encourage people to post content and ask questions, and help provide positive reinforcement for contributions that are thoughtful, or informative, but it's not really helped much.

We continue to explore new ideas to make the forums more useful as a resource, but as time moves forward, the largest users of the forums seems to be people looking to plan for contests, events or villages. Much of the social discussion has moved to FaceBook , twitter, and similar social networks.

If you have ideas for us to try, please suggest them. We have a history of trying new things, and nothing we ever try is guaranteed to remain. Everything is an experiment all the time. :-) We keep what works and dispose of what does not.

Lately, much of my "forum time" has been consumed with diagnosing and addressing bugs in forum software, or finding work-around to make them work for us. This has sucked time away from me looking to test new suggestions. With each upgrade, we see more and more bugs being fixed.

What are your thoughts? What should we do to make the forums useful and used?

Does anyone have suggestions for video and/or image posting software for DEF CON to host that is:
1) Secure (or designed with security as a primary interest well over features)
2) Easy to use for mass-uploading/posting?

It would be nice if such software could work with faceBook or integrate with many kinds of authentication so we don't add "yet another sign-on" as a problem. :-/

Thanks for reading,
-Cot

[Dallas]

Its looking better, it came up and showed more images and a bit faster than last few weeks. Still feels like users are not posting as much, but it could be they are all on FB and Reddit now. Or dont know the login button is at the top of the page :)

[Dark Tangent]

Works for me!

Now after the con we'll look into local image storage.

[TheCotMan]

In editor, locate top-right space "A" icon when you hover over, reads "enable advanced editor" and click that.
In the next top-border, you should see many more tools to markup your post. On 8th space from the left has what looks like a mini icon for a landscape-style icon with a sky, sun and 2 mountains -- click that.
In a new dialogue, you can specify a URL, but don't choose to "serve locally" or "upload" and you should see your editor show you the image in the post you are composing.
Post your post and it should have the image (as referenced from the remote site) for others to read.

Testing this procedure in this post.

If it works for me, does it work for you? If not, where are you trying to do it?

Thanks for the report!
-Cot

[TheCotMan]

Maintenance complete. Forums are back up.

[TheCotMan]

In other news, we have a scheduled perioed of down-time, unlike the unscheduled down-time from yesterday. Forums will be back soon!

-Cot

[TheCotMan]

Minor image reference problem, When I try to add an image to a post and select "Retrieve remote file and reference locally" I get:

Error: This is not a valid image file

I tried with/without the http://, example URL http://i.imgur.com/GODu2INh.jpg
It works fine if i download it and re-upload it without retrieve and reference locally. Maybe I'm expecting that check box to do something different than it actually does?

The forums are behind a firewall, and are not allowed to download attachments from the internet. There has been limited, intermittent support for uploading images from your desktop to the forums, at the risk of the firewall blacklisting you for a while. The mos reliable method of getting images to be displayed in posts has been to use the "BB" markup for an image which is downloadable from elsewhere, and then allow clients that see your post to download the image directly from the other server serving it.

[seeess]

Minor image reference problem, When I try to add an image to a post and select "Retrieve remote file and reference locally" I get:

Error: This is not a valid image file

I tried with/without the http://, example URL http://i.imgur.com/GODu2INh.jpg
It works fine if i download it and re-upload it without retrieve and reference locally. Maybe I'm expecting that check box to do something different than it actually does?

[TheCotMan]

This error when posting is now resolved:

"Error while saving content: SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data"

Also, since the restart yesterday email delivery was broken from forums to users. It is now fixed and email is flowing.

Thanks to DT for his work in getting the server up on new media!

[TheCotMan]

We have one known bug when posting. The post is made, and pushed to the forums, but the user has every indication it actually failed. For now, just refresh the page after you see this error on posting:

"Error while saving content: SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data"

I know what i am looking for, but have not found where it is yet.

[TheCotMan]

Forums suffered from degraded service, when media containing the OS encountered a failure. Dark Tangent worked to resolve this, and I worked to restore service to the forums.

While we had this unscheduled maintenance, I used the time to upgrade some software as many bugs we see were fixed.

Please report any new bugs or issues you find with the forums, in this thread.

Thanks!
-Cot

[TheCotMan]

It has been faster for me.

Forum notice: nulltone has been re-established as a forum moderator. Welcome back!

[Dark Tangent]

Is the speed improvement noticable? Let us know what you think.

[TheCotMan]

The Dark Tangent replaced the old hardware with the new hardware today, upgraded stuff, and this is a test post after I rebuilt our services from source, and upgraded/migrated the DB.

Will it post?

Forums should be up and reachable by regular users soon.

[Dark Tangent]

We're currently running ZFS mirrored Intel enterprise SATA III SSD drives, and with the 32gig of ram all reads / writes are happening out of ZFS ram cache already before hitting the SSDs. That's why I am feeling so certain it's cpu crunching with PHP and not Disk I/O.