Over the weekend, we were hit by a bout of spurious registration attempts by some spammer. The extra load on the servers caused our hosting company to pull the plug without warning – how nice of them.
We’ve reset registration so that new users have to email a request to me and we’ll get the link for that on the sidebar shortly. We’ve also moved to a new hosting company who should be more proactive in communicating with us. However, moving the Agonist’s data is not a small thing, and we’ve still got some intermittent problems. We’re aware that “latest comments” isn’t displaying properly and that user details seem to be awol, and we’re working on those. Please have a little patience as we do the inevitable snagging of such a move and let us know in comments on this post if you spot any other glitches we need to fix.
Thanks, Steve.
http://youtu.be/ErvgV4P6Fzc
for the update I thought that my puter was sick or something
there is a ton of registration spam out there, that’s for sure
–
Hongpong.com
It’s never as easy as “they” tell you LOL. But this is a nice effort. Compared to many, it is a net plus. Much appreciated.
The Money Party RSS
One problem the site has been having is it is running on an outdated version of Drupal, and to upgrade the core Drupal to version 7, which is the “user-friendly” version, would take a LOT of work and with this site has been assessed as being very difficult and probably expensive to do.
One option brought to my attention is converting to WordPress, which is in general a simpler and more user-friendly blogging system. (The New York Times blogs uses it, for example).
Here is some info, I am starting to look into:
Drupal vs WordPress
and I approve this message (speaking as someone who blogged for 5+ yrs using WP).
Srsly. WordPress > Drupal. By leagues.
from people who have used either or both, since I would most likely be involved in helping customize the conversion.
We tried several times to update the core Drupal foundation of this site, with a lot of user-testing and customizing effort from a committed editor/user team, with failure every time due to higher level technical problems of the conversion process itself. Failure not from our end but from the tech person who tried to do the core conversion. (or, you could say, failure from Agonist end to be able to pay them enough for the amount of work they realized it would end up taking). The site does not have enough money to hire conversion specialists who can put in a lot of time for such a project.
So, while it might be true that Drupal has more capabilities for some types of features, if it requires coding-level expertise (which usually must be paid for) to handle upgrades and conversions, as well as even implementing and maintaining some features, then it’s more than we can currently handle.
That is part of the problem why we are susceptible to spam attacks, because we are not using the up to date Drupal spam protection and security, etc… because we can’t upgrade to that Drupal version.
So, yeah WordPress might change the look and feel we are used to (check out NYT blogs and I’ll look for some other site examples to see what variety there might be) … but if it’s simple, works well, and is easy and inexpensive to maintain, then those things are big advantates.
I personally can handle anything a Drupal superuser/admin can do with the admin modules etc, and a little bit of modification to HTML and PHP code (but I’m not up to date on that, either … just the admin level stuff) and I used to code and know how to read and write tech manuals. But for the conversions, all I could do was help customize features and help explain what we wanted and the priorities to the tech guys who were trying to do the conversions (and each time they ended up giving up or saying it would cost some real payment for a LOT of their time to deal with it).
So there we have it.
That we can use while the latest comments link/page is not working.
I might have to lower its position since it’s currently at the top of the left sidebar, unless all y’all like it that way
The block only shows a limited number of recent comments compared to the way we had the page programmed.
eom
The origin of the universe has not as yet been shown to be a conspiracy theory
of WordPress architecture (both .com & .org):
TIME Magazine
RawStory
CNN blogs eg, CNN Political Ticker
Feministe
Lawfare
Zenpundit
More here & here
I did inhale.
Nothing happens when I try it.
The origin of the universe has not as yet been shown to be a conspiracy theory
The search function is at least badly delayed, if working at all. I have made it only accessible to logged-in users, so as not to slow down the site too much for now.
User information is also not displaying, when you click on a user name.
And many posts done as pages (by editors/admins) such as the old comments page and old FAQ page, are not displaying. I copied them over onto diary entries so they will dislpay.
Steve is having the new provider tech person look into the above.
I turned off some of the CPU-demanding settings, try it and see what you think.
eom
The origin of the universe has not as yet been shown to be a conspiracy theory
the past few days, with error messages such as the below. I forwarded them to Steve, who has passsed them on to the host’s tech guy.
Error messages when not logged in such as:
Warning: mysql_connect(): Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock’ (111) in /var/www/agonist.org/httpdocs/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 31 Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock’ (111)
And error messages when logged in, such as:
Fatal error: MySQL server has gone away query: INSERT INTO watchdog (uid, type, message, severity, link, location, hostname, timestamp) VALUES (6, ‘php’, ‘Lost connection to MySQL server during query\nquery: SELECT src FROM url_alias WHERE dst = 'send/75951' in /var/www/agonist.org/httpdocs/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 66.’, 2, ”, ‘/’, ’74.107.104.20′, 1346326997) in /var/www/agonist.org/httpdocs/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 66 Fatal error: MySQL server has gone away query: SELECT sid FROM sessions WHERE sid = ‘dum56rs9v96breopltu03lurg4′ in /var/www/agonist.org/httpdocs/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 66
But James has had another of the servers for another of the owner’s websites fail today too, so he’s stirring pots with both hands. I can only ask for patience.