Welcome / About This Forum

[<BS>]

Originally Posted - 2017/10/27 04:53:11 UTC
---
Not a fan of tapatalk.

[Steve Davy]

Originally Posted - 2017/10/27 05:49:12 UTC
---
I see that the Funston phpBB Group forum has not been overcome by this crap. For whatever that is worth.

[Tad Eareckson]

We're back up, alive, restored - to my indescribable relief.

Beaucoup thanks to Zack, fer sure, and also to Bob, for at the very least an effort and giving me hope through this 1.5 day nightmare.

Need to do a little restoration work, more later. And everybody pray that this is a permanent fix and that we'll never again have another experience like it.
---
Announcement - 2017/10/27 20:15:00 UTC

Locking three most recent topics while I manipulate posts to get things back as close as possible to the order in which they would've appeared minus some of this overhaul and restoration chaos.

[<BS>]

My thanks to all who helped with the restoration.

[Zack C]

I didn't do anything, other than post about our certificate error in the support forum. They replied yesterday that they were working on it but have said nothing since.

Unless someone knows something I don't, I suspect they temporarily reverted this and possibly other forums having issues until they get everything sorted out. I'm afraid this means the restoration is only temporary.

[Tad Eareckson]

I was afraid this would be too good to be true but needed a longish break from probable reality.

I don't know what I'll do if that was just a taste of our future. And so far I haven't heard anybody here singing praises of Tapatalk.

http://www.flyfunston.org/bbs/
http://www.shga.com/forum/phpBB3/
http://www.ushawks.org/
http://ozreport.com/forum/
http://www.chgpa.org/forums/

I can live with any of these - preferably Funston 'cause it's identical to what we've always had.

I think I'll be able to figure out how to do backups.

If/When we get another attack I would appreciate it people hold off on posting until I give a green. It was a real nightmare reconstructing and reordering things after this one.

Zack, if you can get us moved to someplace we can keep our identity and stay safe... Or tell us how we can do it.

Many thanks...

[Tad Eareckson]

Had a note from Zack, 2017/10/28 02:30:48 UTC, a half hour before my last post, but hadn't checked my email.

Followed his instructions for downloading our database. It's brain dead easy, straightforward, but I'm always afraid to touch and experiment with big things.

Administration Control Panel
MAINTENANCE
DATABASE
Backup
Full - gzip - download
Select all
submit

And the results:
backup_1509178431_0bb56b41f66d81e3.sql - 2017/10/28 08:14:00 UTC - 93.1 MB

That's modest YouTube video size. I archive all videos referenced on Kite Strings and have a fair number ten and over times that size. So anybody with Moderator privileges and a tiny bit of available hard drive space is welcome to do this.

Zack's currently too tied up to get into finding and getting us onto solid ground and I'm currently too stupid to know where and how to begin but I'll try to work on that.

Regarding my restoration work on our inter-tsunami posting activity...

Posts 10684 through 10687 were wiped out when our Tapatalk Masters restored us to where we were just prior with their phpBB backup. Not a big problem 'cause I had everything archived. Then Bob got in three more posts before I could react. Then I created four placeholder posts before my first new one four up from this one.

Then I recreated the lost posts with their original ID numbers, shuffled things so the appeared in their original order, documented original timestamps. Required locking topics to keep things from getting more interesting, replacing content, changer poster attributions, moving doctored posts to the target topics. Total fuckin' nightmare.

I'm living in absolute dread of the next and final Tapatalk attack. Any ideas for holding onto what we've always had will be way more than welcome.

[Zack C]

Kite Strings is now self-hosted, so we won't have to worry about takeovers again. Feel free to resume posting. Thanks to Steve for grabbing a database backup just before Tapatalk took over the second time. I believe we only lost one post, which Tad has already restored.

The one major downside to the migration I'm aware of is we've lost all of our attachments. Fortunately, there weren't that many. Attachments include avatar pics, so you'll need to re-upload those.

If the board accepts your login credentials but doesn't actually log you in, you need to delete any existing cookies you have for kitestrings.org and refresh the page. If you're not sure how to do this, Google the name of your browser followed by 'delete cookies' (such as 'chrome delete cookies' or 'safari delete cookies'). I recommend only deleting the cookies related to 'kitestrings'; deleting all of them will work but may log you out of other sites or reset preferences for some sites.

URLs of the form 'postXX.html#pXX', 'topicXX-YY.html', and 'forumXX.html' no longer work. However, they will automatically be redirected to the accepted forms. There may be other problem forms I don't know about, so if you find any links to Kite Strings (whether from an external site or within Kite Strings itself) that no longer work, please let me know. The exception is Google search results that contain topic titles within their URLs (such as 'airborne-release-t35.html'). I'm aware these exist and could probably fix them but I'm not going to bother. This format was introduced with Tapatalk so any search results in this form are the result of the crawling Google has done in just the past week. I would therefore imagine Google will correct them within a comparable amount of time.

Please let me know if you find anything else amiss. I'm not aware of any other issues related to the move, but I haven't spent much time on the board.

[<BS>]

Kite Strings is now self-hosted, so we won't have to worry about takeovers again.

That's great. Thanks Zack, Steve and Tad.

[Tad Eareckson]

And Bob. He helped get me better educated on how this geek stuff works and gave me hope about recovering from that vicious viral attack from the Tapatalk motherfuckers. Gawd what a relief it was to see things starting getting back to normal last weekend. Big thanks to all for their efforts and inputs. A book could be written on what a trip to the sewer Tapatalk is and I hope someone writes it an sues their asses off. I'd put zillions of hours into making and keeping the appearance of our forum information packed, tight, efficient and they just bulldozed their way in, flipped some switches, and neutralized all those efforts. And pretty hard to believe that a few other victim groups aren't of similar sentiments.

No, wait. Just googled "Tapatalk sucks" and apparently we actually ARE the only individuals in the global forum world less than thrilled with the takeover. Go figure.

We still have some issues and are hurting in some capability departments but they're all majorly dwarfed by the least of Tapatalk's atrocities. And maybe this:

Your phpBB installation is not up to date.
Below is a link to the release announcement, which contains more information as well as instructions on updating. - Re-Check version
A new feature release 3.1.11 is available. Please read the release announcement to learn about what it has to offer, and how to upgrade.

3.0.11 - Current version
3.0.14 - Latest version

from the Administration Control Panel will help.

Videos - YouTube, Vimeo - aren't displaying. That's a bit of a pain 'cause it's real nice having a feel or certainty for what's there to make a decision about whether or not it's worth a(nother) look. I'm guessing this is fixable.

Lost attachments. Maybe just one of one. All I can remember is Zack C's:

USHPA Pilot Proficiency Program, June 2012.
USHPA SOP 12-02 June 2012.pdf

Pre Zack Marzec aerotowing SOPs from his 2013/02/15 04:00:01 UTC "Weak links" post. Pretty sure I have a copy somewhere I can restore. If anyone else remembers or finds anything...

Lost our avatars. I've restored mine - as you can plainly see here and just about everywhere else on the forum. I've jacked up the settings from the microscopic 90x90 default to 200x200. Please restore yours and take advantage of the available resolution. They're kinda fun, make pages less boring looking, useful in quickly identifying authors when skimming content. (And didn't y'all love the Tapatalk trimmed off the seventy percent of our original rectangles that wouldn't fit in the circles that they decided was what we REALLY wanted.)

Mixed results on Google searches. They know we're here but a lot of links need tweaking.

During the attack and recovery periods I wanted/needed to be doing SOMETHING with the forum. During our earlier years (we'll turn seven come Thanksgiving Day) I'd been archiving my Private Messaging traffic - In and Out but had let it go close to three years back - 2014/12/05. The vast majority of it consists of notifications of my posting errors from Steve and Brian who proofread the crap outta everything I write and catch lotsa stuff I'd miss at gunpoint. (And one really NEEDS someone else to proofread his stuff 'cause the author tends to be only capable of seeing what he'd intended to write.) But there's also lotsa stuff on leads and incident analysis that's useful for reference.

Had/Have totals of 2015 In and 802 Out. First four years worth included chronologically within my posts archive, last three needed pulling and ordering. I was in Tapatalk which had decided that there was no fuckin' WAY I'd want my preferences set to anything but Eastern Standard Time / "America/New_York" / Greenwich minus five hours.

So I spent a lot of several days harvesting and compiling near a couple thousand posts and set up a search and replace strategy. Lotsa fun 'cause for the local 19-20-21-22-23 evening hours you've also gotta advance the dates.

Then you've gotta manually sequence the In and Out stuff so everything's chronological and makes sense.

And then you find that things aren't making sense 'cause for some of your harvesting sessions Tapatalk was advancing five hours and others - maybe a third of the total - it was doing six. I so do hope I get to take a flamethrower to some of those sonsabitches someday (soon).

So then when Zack starts getting our beloved phpBB version restored and running you've gotta go blind checking the legitimacy of the sequences, making corrections, altering the sequencing as necessary. Good thing I'm so obsessive/compulsive that I'm incapable of stopping or even taking short breaks once I get started on a project like this. (And I don't even wanna remember how quickly Zack got a working version of Kite Strings 1 back up and think about the fact that if I'd delayed the harvesting phase a day and a half I could've pulled the archiving project off with three percent of the effort afforded me by Tapatalk.)

(UTC) Western European Time, Greenwich Mean Time
Y/m/d H:i:s e
2017/11/09 12:13:42 UTC

If it's not like that I break out in a rash.

Worth it? Dunno. But it feels good to have this much taken care of. (Still need to integrate most of my previously archived stuff and a lot of email traffic.)

Kite Strings itself worth it? We're not gonna reform the sport on any significant scale. We're mostly just documenting its extinction and identifying all the sociopaths, parasites, assholes, dynamics responsible for sending it down the toilet. But hell, we're the only ones taking the stand and we all learn stuff along the way - mostly about how and why hang gliding's so hell-bent on unlearning as much as possible in the way of aeronautical principles.