Housekeeping - This forum - performance, etc

[SpaceNut]

it looks like we were in quarantine while off line and it looks like the dreamhost side is getting ready to put the site back up.

newmars.com is almost here!
Upload your website to get started.

copilot indicates
DreamHost has no index.php / index.html to serve

once james get the site up then its
Next step: check the DreamHost user directory
You will find one of these:

newmars.com_disabled/

newmars.com_quarantine/

QUARANTINE/

domain.com.old/

domain.com.bak/

or a missing/broken symlink

[tahanson43206]

For SpaceNut re Post of Mon Mar 30, 2026 9:04 pm ... thank you for your support. The situation has passed. All seems well now.
***
This post is to let you know about a curious report I got from a relative.
The relative lives far from Seattle and far from where I live, so I asked him to ask his AI friends what happened to NewMars.com/forums.

To my surprise, all four systems think the web site is still alive. They reported details about recent activity, but did not seem to realize the DNS names are no longer responding.

I asked my relative to check again, specifically stating that the web site is offline. To my surprise, the AI tool (I'm not sure which one) found new-mars.org and came back with that. Unfortunately that response did NOT find the phpBB3 folder.

I'd be interested if you try the same thing with CoPilot. Your computer is already talking to new-mars.org/phpBB3, so I expect CoPilot will find that right away, but it might be worth asking anyway. You need to start by stating that NewMars.com/forums is offline and not visible on the Internet. You might then ask what is the name of the replacement web site, including the directory where the web site resides.

(th)

[SpaceNut]

I do hope you are feeling a bit better and if not do not wait to seek out help

[SpaceNut]

the forum was intact at the time that domain was taken done. The hack was at the root where the wordpress hit.
the stuff for the forum should be fine.

[tahanson43206]

For SpaceNut ....

As a follow up to Post #484, I wrote a relative who lives in a remote part of the US, to ask if they would enter the Google Query I posed in #484.

As far as I know, this relative has never looked at NewMars.com, and no one from his region has visited the site.

I'm hoping my relative will try the Google query and let me know what happens. I'm not expecting much. Google should be able to find records of NewMars.com right up to the instant it was taken down, but I'm not expecting much information after that.

That query might reasonably be entered by any of our former members, whether they were in the States or Europe, or even Australia.

If you were willing to ask CoPilot to investigate, the results would be interesting.

One request I do have .... if you publish a conversation with CoPilot here, please be sure to include the query you use. The results you might publish without the query are likely to be interesting, but only you would know the context.

Our weekly Google Meeting will the the second since the outage began. We have achieved what appears (to me at least) be a stable condition, and we have the potential of rebuilding from here.

Thanks to the IT support you asked me to do over a number of years, I have most (if not all) of the forum posts saved in text files in the Pothole finder PC. It would be a tremendous amount of work to restore all those posts. Something you should be aware of ... Since I am only a Moderator, I have NO record of posts by either you or kbd512. The Pothole finder merely notes that the posts exist and goes on. All other posts are saved in the run log.

That means that ** every ** post by RobertDyck is preserved.

An alternative is to restore from our 2024 backup (ahead of the software upgrade) and rebuild from there, but that too would require a lot of work, because we are then talking about either restoring FluxBB (as upgraded) and adding it to the Cloudflare secure service, or converting the database from FluxBB to phpBB2 and then again to phpBB3. All of that would be a ** lot ** of work.

[tahanson43206]

SpaceNut ... let's think about how we might be able to contact our members who still would like to participate in the life of the forum.

We have five members thanks to our pre-existing email correspondence.

No one else has responded to outreach email.

Either the addresses we have are no longer working, or, the spam filter trappd our outreach, or the member is not reading the email because so many of us have multiple emails these days, or ... possibly ... the members saw the email but could not connect for some reason.

Let's try to think of how we might be able to help our members (who still want to connect) to know we are alive in the new address.

I'm pretty well out of ideas at this point.

RobertDyck did provide email addresses for two members, and the implication I got was that RobertDyck had actually corresponded with those members by email at some point. I've asked RobertDyck to attempt to correspond with those members again. I have no way of knowing if RobertDyck ever saw my request, because we haven't heard from him since.

My hope is that a spam filter might allow RobertDyck's address to flow through to the members.

I haven't tried using Google to try to find us. Google might "know" about the transition.

Our members might ask Google "What happened to newmars.com"

I wonder what the answer would be.

(th)

[SpaceNut]

we had started that when we were deactivating to see if the user would respond bt I think we were running into same thing back then

[tahanson43206]

For SpaceNut ....

A relative who uses Apple computers kindly tested our new URL and reported that the site came up and "looks good".

We have confirmations from Apple, Chromebook, Windows 7, Windows 10 and Windows 11 and Linux.

We have confirmations from New Hampshire, Texas and Canada.

None of the folks (members) to whom emails were sent have responded. The emails may no longer work, or our email may have gone into the spam filter.

I have requests out to other relatives to test the site in their locations.

Looking forward, it is obvious that we should have been confirming the email addresses of our members still worked.

Rechecking the email annually would seem reasonable. Certainly checking it at the beginning of a membership would seem appropriate. The FluxBB package allowed fake email addresses, and that is how so many of our 20,000+ hackers got in. We don't need to continue that.

(th)

[tahanson43206]

Here's another item for SpaceNut ...

Have your say about this website and forums. All opinions welcome! See Recruiting Topic for Procedure to join.

That line appears at the top of the main page.

At the moment, we don't ** have ** such a topic.

(th)

[tahanson43206]

This is for SpaceNut ....
Things appear to have stabilized...
We are entering the second week of operation in our new online home ...
This was a test site to evaluate phpBB3, and never intended for full operation.
Now that we seem to be here for a while, let's think about how we might be able to add some important features that were not needed for testing.
***
Contact is something I'd like to address ... we do not currently have email support for our Contact button. Gemini tells me there may be a way to implement that with an outside service of some kind. Potentially it might be possible to set something up in Azure.
***
Let's start thinking about how we might address that need.
***
It just occurred to me that we could advertise our Gmail address, the way we did at the former site.
(th)