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.