Forum closing in 2011?

[SSCBen]

I see I have sparked some more strong responses. I have made a decision.

Perhaps I was too selfish earlier, but I did ask to check. The forum will remain open, but I'll retire for anything but maintenance. cantab, let me know if you need any help or anything as I will not check the forum regularly.

By the way, I am discussing graduate study with a professor at my university into solar thermal energy. This is what is on my mind at the moment.

[C-A_99]

I'm still here, but not quite active nor good enough with the software to manage it all, at least at the moment. I am also very unsure on commiting to such a task. In the event SSC goes under however, I can still do my part to push tech-related information onto iSn.

Edit: Didn't see Ben's post. Perhaps if the administration works together more closely (including me, which I've been pretty lazy on keeping up with at many times) we may be able to balance the workload on whatever is needed to keep things running smoothly.

[martianshark]

I'm okay with becomming an administrator if you need more help

[-G-JiV-]

Me too Just let me know^^

[Specter]

I have also offered becoming a mod/admin in the past. I have run forums before and have helped run a few forum based websites. (In fact i just got mine back up)

[SEAL]

I read this earlier, but I haven't had the time to post.

I see that you decided to leave the forums open. I'm glad, because I've always liked SSC, and whenever I have a tech question, this is always the first place I go.

I'd offer to become an admin as well (If you need that many. ), since I moderate at iSoaker, but I don't know how much time I'll have.

[martianshark]

You're a moderator at iSoaker?

[SEAL]

Yes. I've been for a month or two.

By the way, our computer got infected with a virus yesterday, so I'm not sure whether or not the virus got any of my passwords, but I may start doing abnormal things like posting links to porn sites, spamming, or whatever else. I assure you that I would never do anything like that, so if that happens, then it's definitely not me.

[mysterio]

Please dont shut down SSC. I really like it here. Maybe you could find a guy to do computery stuff for the site.

[C-A_99]

SEAL, you'd better get your system in order as you're responsible for anything you post. That said, it is almost impossible that a virus will go around posting at SSC, of all places. When people want to spam, they use different methods that involve registration of accounts instead of looking for infected computers to control.

I use Avast antivirus, but AVG is also good. If you look around, you can find a lot of free or even open source anti-malware programs that are relatively effective. (And won't slow down your computer significantly like Norton does, nor rip your wallet apart.) I haven't worked with AVG but it shouldn't be so popular for no reason. I've used ClamWin Portable and Threatfire. Unfortunately, it seems that almost no anti-malware program can fix system problems. (i.e. Antiviruses may cripple system files to prevent antivirus software from installing or running, mess with the registries, etc.)

If you think any of your passwords may be compromised, change them from a non-infected computer. Usually that's only necessary if you have reason to believe that the passwords have been compromised.

A good guarantee to full virus explusion from the system and complete operation of all system components is a reformat/reinstall of the operating system. You do have to get your stuff in order though, and back up important files obviously.

[-G-JiV-]

I do use AVG since years. It is free, great, does not slow your Computer and it does everything alone Sure thing, never had any problems with it and also no problems with any viruses (plural of virus = ? )yet

I can just recommend it^^

[C-A_99]

Generally, any word ending in an "s" will be argumented with "es" for plural. When showing both possession and pluralism, an apostrophe is added to the end of the word. (i.e. "The elves' built over nine-thousand CPS water blasters at the toy factory.")

Avast and AVG tend to be more targetted as well. On my dad's laptop, one cannot run and the other cannot install, respectively. However, other programs I've installed have not picked up any threats, so maybe I'm dealing with very stealthy malware, or some computer problem that occured earlier crippled the two AV programs.

[SSCBen]

For anyone interested in becoming an admin, stick around and we'll see what we can do.

I'd like to reiterate that we don't need more forum moderators. We need someone who could do various behind-the-scenes maintenance things like make database backups, fix scripts, etc. In recent years, Silence and I have been the only ones to do this work. All that is needed is some basic knowledge of Unix, PHP, MySQL, HTML, etc.

I can continue to pay for hosting essentially indefinitely. But I will be distracted from the site for long periods of time and I can not guarantee that the site will be online all of the time. If our host upgrades something and that breaks one of our scripts and I don't learn about it for a few days, I generally have to wait another few days before I'll have some time to investigate, and often these problems aren't so easy to fix. Remember the weird problems with the site going offline? Sometimes we can't even figure out what's going wrong! But we need someone to do this sort of work.

If you know anyone who could do this sort of work, let me know. I'd prefer for them to be a long time contributor to the forum, but this obviously is not required.

[cantab]

I think what would help myself and the other admins is knowing more about what needs doing. Basic stuff, where to begin really. You mention Unix, HTML, SQL; I know that stuff. (My PHP knowledge is pretty rudimentary). I don't know things like whether there's a site admin interface separate from the forum admin, how I access the website error logs if there's a problem, even how to add articles to the site.

[SSCBen]

Ah, okay, I'll outline that in the admin. board tomorrow.