Author Topic: WinMx Community - Do Your Part !! (Read 1946 times)

GhostShip · « **on:** August 11, 2018, 04:14:10 pm »

Folks it seems to me that a kind of malaise has crept over many of you, I see few posts and generally little interest shown in anything, the same few hard core folks seem to be the ones I spend most of my time reporting to or conversing with.

I would like to take this moment in time to lay out what I enjoy from you all and to be fair its not silence, feedback is the most important part of what we do here and shapes and forms this sites direction of travel, I have spoken to many folks in private whom will put forward the old line about there being so much info here theres no need to post or theres nothing new happening so whats to post about ?

I know only too well that a healthy and vibrant site reflects the flavour of its community, currently that flavour seems to me to be one of indifference and inward facing thought, I honestly dont feel this is the best outlook for us as a community to take forward we have to get back to our roots and share both our knowledeg our ideas and our time, theres no point in waiting for others to do things when we all have execellent brains to employ on problems facing the community, sharing our thoughts on the best way ahead for the future and building on what we already have to improve our lot, I have a good idea of what I want for the community but without a guiding hand from others in the community are we still heading our ship into the right wind ?

Let me lay it out for you:

I want to hear your thoughts ideas, and suggestions for improvements that you want to see undertaken here, whats missing or broken that you found or may find useful, alternatively it may be that you have time to spare and want to help us and the rest of the community out in some respect ?

Drop us a line here so we can focus on delivering some of your requirements, it really is that simple, as always thanks for your time folks.

PS: we dont bite new posters (much

)

Bearded Blunder · « **Reply #1 on:** August 14, 2018, 03:28:29 am »

Well, just a thought, but I wonder how many are put off by the fact that some browsers warn against logging in here. Currently Opera puts a notice beside the input field, and the next version of Chrome is set to up the ante even more.

Added to google down-rating search results for plain http sites, so here's my suggestion, for what it's worth, Have a look at how well LetsEncrypt would work with whatever you're using for a host, it's some effort to set up, but the certs are free, and the system automated.

GhostShip · « **Reply #2 on:** August 14, 2018, 05:51:57 am »

Hmm I did look at that some time ago after I posted a news article on the topic but when i saw some back end work was required to implement the HTTPS side of things I couldnt with all good concience ask Nylly to spare her free time given the workload would fall on her alone.

I think we are lucky in that most of the folks have us bookmarked and Google continues to index us daily still even if they are downrating original material producing sites such as ourselves for other reasons

I think the current recipe of stagnant forum and a lack of current information on utilising winmx across various operating system platforms is something we seriously need to address to at least hold the userbase churn at a sensible value, I had expressed some interest in VM systems to support the network way into the future however we are stuck in the rut of few staff and limited opportunity to gather the material to display we are simply treading water without proper userbase support and interaction.

I am grateful for your input btw Bearded, as you know we dont run ads here and all costs are paid for by the volunteers so we create and display the information and help guides we produce simply to deliver it to our fellow community members, its always been fun to work on bringing new items to the attention of the folks and its no fun if they dont do their part in return.

I made the post above to simply remind the folks still bothering to visit here that taking part and sharing time, knowledge and ideas are the lifeblood of a community and that we all lose out when the ethos of sharing that binds our community is exchanged for an opposite concept.

I will create a list to which i will add the 2 good ideas we have received so far and look at prioritising those, I did think of having a public list of tasks that I require help with to deliver new materials but its a double edged sword, once again thank you for your helpful words and taking the time to share them with us

Bearded Blunder · « **Reply #3 on:** August 14, 2018, 09:49:26 am »

Well there is some backend config to set up LetsEncrypt to do https, it's not that huge though, I don't know what your hosting arrangements are, but basically it's set up once, the client that does DV checking & renewals is automated, runs on a cron job (or from scheduled tasks if you host on Windows like I sadly do at present)

<<< He's planned though apt-get update && apt-get upgrade is LOTS quicker than Windows update, probably safer on Debian stable, and doesn't usually call for a reboot either ..

Amounts to setting up one of the many clients, dead simple, that looks after authenticating your control of the domain & renewing.. bit more effort if you want a wildcard cert, for that you have to set a txt record in DNS to set up / renew. Once certbot or similar is set up, it's just enabling it on your webserver, and possibly setting a redirect from http: to https:

Hardest part was tracking down all the smileys, images, & theme resources being pulled in by unsecured links, & changing those to https so people don't get mixed content warnings. Tat wasn't so much difficult as tedious. Glad I *mostly* used relative links, but found out I hadn't been consistent enough

Did it for myself the other night, after I got a warning spam from my registrar about Google Chrome's notices scaring anyone on plain old http a few days back, haven't got round to enabling it on MXStuff yet, but the certificate is in place, not that MXStuff gets any visitors besides GoogleBot & spammers, I had to turn off auto registration & resort to "Ask in the room if you want to sign up" (nobody has) till I get the inclination to upgrade MyBB there. Would have done so ages back, but so many of the forum templates have been edited ( Good old KM ) the upgrade won't run without breaking it

Probably quicker to backup the db, install the same version fresh, restore & upgrade *that*....

GhostShip · « **Reply #4 on:** August 14, 2018, 06:08:02 pm »

Your walk through seems most helpful, I shall put the post before Nylly for her attention.

Would you like me to add Mxstuff to the sites links section ?

Its been a while since I,ve had the time to look it over and I can see we need a roaming site editor to check out many of our pages for old links etc but thats another story..lol

Bearded Blunder · « **Reply #5 on:** August 14, 2018, 08:30:05 pm »

On adding MXStuff to the links (if it's not there), I'd hold off till it actually is https & I've got the forum updated to a useable state, I need to upgrade MyBB so I can upgrade PHP to something more recent too, the existing forum fills the log with deprecated warnings unless I disable logging them, so upgrading PHP is out till the forum is updated.. there's a whole domino topple waiting...

As to LetsEncrypt, there are a metric sh*t-tonne of online tutorials for setting up and enabling https most of them for Linux hosts for what it's worth, it looks easier for Linux than Windows hosting, certainly the acme clients for verification & renewal are more mature especially the recommended one.

If I get bored, I might have a poke around the site here and report any links I find broken or in need of updating, though I've plenty of site fixing of my own to do, I have 17 modified forum templates to inspect to determine what was done to them, and if I need to modify updated ones in a similar way...