TGO David

I've made some changes to our own banner ads (local vendors) and the way that they are served up to stop this nonsense from happening. For what it's worth, our ads are what they claimed were malicious code most recently. Pretty idiotic of them, but I'll play along since I have absolutely no recourse not to. In honor of this, I'm sporting a new avatar. Enjoy.

I've sent Google a rather tersely worded email this morning regarding the issue. We'll see what happens. I'm starting to feel like this is some of their anti-firearm slant coming through.

Jack, if you worked at a place where there was a seriously higher than average chance that you'd be robbed every single day and possible injured or killed in the process, would you be bitching about security measures like this or would you be infinitely relieved that you might have good odds of making it home alive each night? I mean... seriously... boo hoo. Don't like it, bank somewhere else. REALLY don't like it, move somewhere else. REALLY REALLY REALLY don't like it, vote the ******* Ford family and their ilk out of every possible office in Memphis and change your town.

For pete's sake, please don't go around spreading baseless rumors about it being the ads. It was not the ads and you have no way of knowing whether it was or wasn't in the first place. All you're doing is spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt among people who will unfortunately take you as a subject matter expert and now fight against the ads on the site. If you're not the admin, there's no reason for you to even guess what's going on. Especially not publicly. That said, the problem has been identified as bad code in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) software that we use and it has been corrected. It was never an exploit; it was just code that Google -- in their infinite wisdom -- had determined could be used to unwittingly redirect folks to other sites if it conditions were absolutely perfect. In practice there was never a problem and never a risk. Google is just the 800lb gorilla and gets to swing its weight around whenever it damn well chooses. It may take a few days for us to get off of this silly blacklist but we will get off of it. Just be patient and spread the word. The RIGHT word.

It's a false alarm, folks. I'm working with Google to see what the deal is.

Not the right way to handle this. PM's please.

I'm pretty sure that's not it. But thanks for jumping to conclusions. For the record, I am not getting any such warnings. I'll do some investigating but I just got back in town from a 24hr excursion from which I am extremely exhausted. This matter may or may not get fixed today. Thanks.

Understood. vBulletin has a lot of neat features that in theory would be really awesome to use, but in [my] practice have always sort of sucked for one reason or another. I wish they'd get their act together and polish up the software.

Because on another forum where I implemented it, people were largely not familiar with what it was and started using it thinking they were sending Private Messages. Therefore people were upset when everyone was "reading their mail"

Bad Decision Bear sez... Nothing else to see here. Move along.

Roger that.

I know a guy who, if he doesn't cut out the childish crap, might end up getting banned before the points have a chance to accumulate. True story.

Please don't click for the sake of clicking. Our ad revenue doesn't come from clicks; it's done by impressions per month. By all means if you see something that interests you, click through to it because that helps the advertising company justify their services to their own respective customers (i.e. Brownells, etc.)

Comcast is a pain in the butt for a lot of forum admins because of how heavily they filter their email based on a number of criteria that pertain to mail routing, IP addresses, server masking and other things forum users are never privy to. I've fought this with them off and on over the years and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Typically it will work for a little while and then they'll crank down the screws on their spam filter some more and once again our mail stops going through. When you look at the emails our server sends out, it's pretty easy to see how they could look like spam to an unintelligent mail filter. They are always the same format, they use very general terms and they read like a form letter. Duh, right? I've spent hours of my time trying to fix this before. I just don't have that kind of time to devote to one ISP's quirky email problems. If you're not getting email from us at Comcast, use Gmail just for TGO stuff. Sorry but that's the best I can do right now.

By now you may have noticed the new banner ads appearing beneath the TGO Supporting Vendor ads. So what's up with that, right? As TGO continues to grow so too do the demands placed on our server systems. When we increase our capacity to keep up with our growth, that in turn increases the size of our hosting bill every month and that means that lately I've had to personally subsidize more and more of our expenses out of my own pocket. While TGO is still a labor of love for me, it's always better when the site can pay its own way. Recently I was approached by a national advertising firm to see if I would be interested in allowing them to place their ads on TGO in addition to the ads we already serve. After evaluating it carefully and receiving their assurance that we can continue to feature our homegrown ads prominently in addition to their ads (i.e. two ads per page; one ours - one theirs) I have decided to go ahead and embark on this. Even so, I have negotiated with this advertising firm to ensure that TGO Vendor ads appear FIRST on the page, above their ads. Our TGO Vendors are the local hometown folks and I want their advertisements featured first. These ads will bring some more revenue into the forum so that we can continue to grow the TGO community and the TGO brand. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Thanks.

Ok... what am I supposed to do about Comcast's mail service?

The downtime today was due to an upgrade at our datacenter that I wasn't aware of. They claim that they sent out an email ahead of time but I couldn't find it in my inbox.

It's a great movie that just doesn't get much attention.

There just aren't very many of them.

Understood. No, to the best of my knowledge he just decided to pull away from the forums and spend more time with his family.

You're telling me. I'm hopeful that after the end of this month, my schedule will slow down a little. Work isn't planning any more travel for me as far as I know.

Actually Spuds and I have quite the gay fling going on. It's a rare, beautiful thing when you can find a man who is willing to be the catcher all the time, but Spuds attacks that job like he's getting paid for it. If you know him, tell him I said thanks for being there.

Good luck complaining to him. He's never around.

Space herpes.

Do want! A 700 is in my future... I've just got to find the right opportunity to buy one.