Jon Matcho Posted September 22, 2014 Share Posted September 22, 2014 Hello Everyone, First off, please allow me to express my regrets and sincere apologies for not being able to return the Canard Zone back to service until now. The Canard Zone being offline was not a result of a conscious or calculated decision whatsoever. I am certain that I have personally missed the Canard Zone as much as anyone else in the community, and have been burdened by resolving the issue for years now. What happened? Sometime on/after January 27th of 2010 the building where the Canard Zone was housed suffered a break-in while another tenant was moving out. In addition to several pieces of equipment going missing, application servers were removed from the datacenter that were essential to the Canard Zone's operation (and not to mention my business' customer projects). While no data was lost or compromised, the overall impact overwhelmed many aspects of my life at the time. I felt compelled to keep a low profile regarding the break-in over fear of being sued at the time. The aftermath Immediately after the break-in was discovered I secured the data, the databases, and any and all content relating to the Canard Zone onto redundant backups in separate off-site storage locations. After several months of tending to these business and related personal matters, the pain and weight of leaving the Canard Zone offline grew too heavy, and I began to consider options for restoring the Canard Zone to service. All options would require a fair amount of work, so I began to look for ways to streamline its future operations (most members were not aware of the massive effort required to keep spammers out, as spam-posts were never visible to the community). Whatever was to be put back online simply could not require "staff" and volunteers to spend inordinate amounts of time pulling weeds that were growing wild. At the time spammers had mastered the art of attacking forums with junk posts which typically involved forum admins pre-approving new members one-by-one. While this might sound easy on a Google mail group, try doing it for 1,000 new users/day, fed from some specialized software designed for this one purpose. After a substantial amount of system rebuilding, research, and trials of new software, I was able to orchestrate the rather complex sequence of database conversion steps required to get the Canard Zone online to where it is now. This involved several interim conversion steps, with the requirement being to NOT lose any data whatsoever. Compressed from the calendar months it took, the activity represented several weeks worth of actual work. As you can see all of the forum data and membership has been restored. So now what? I assure you that I will not be going through this again. A disaster recovery plan has been drafted and will allow for the Canard Zone to return to service (in the event of a catastrophic failure) within days. I am committed that the Canard Zone will be online and available at least until my death (hopefully 40+ years from now, but more realistically under community control before then). As a result of this transformation, the following have been put in place: Operating in a cloud/hosted environment (no physical access) Modern software designed with spam prevention in mind; no spammers allowed Will operate as a permanent Internet project, similar to Wikipedia. Opportunity for growth and additional functionality I'll be looking to tune the current software's operation before adding anything additional, such as photo galleries, news articles and blogs, file downloads, and other things we expect as Internet travelers. I do hope you appreciate that the Canard Zone is back, and I very much look forward to reading your updates in the near future. Sincerely, Jon This post has been promoted to an article Quote Jon Matcho Builder & Canard Zone Admin Now: Rebuilding Quickie Tri-Q200 N479E Next: Resume building a Cozy Mark IV Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Craig Posted September 22, 2014 Share Posted September 22, 2014 As one of the newer disciples of the canardian ways, it's good to see this back, and I look forward to perusing the oft mentioned lost (now found) archives. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radioflyer Posted September 22, 2014 Share Posted September 22, 2014 Thank you Jon for this effort. I can't even begin to imagine what you must have gone through to restart this forum. The more mediums for discussing all things canardian, the better. I look forward to frequent visits. --Jose 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ErlendM Posted September 22, 2014 Share Posted September 22, 2014 Thanks! I've missed this forum! 1 Quote Erlend Moen Norway Cozy MK IV #1556 - Chapter 16http://cozy.ljosnes.no Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aviator_edb Posted September 22, 2014 Share Posted September 22, 2014 YAY! Welcome back everyone. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
macleodm3 Posted September 22, 2014 Share Posted September 22, 2014 Thanks Jon! There is a lot of history here, and its nice to have this forum available again. 1 Quote Andrew Anunson I work underground and I play in the sky... no problem Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon Matcho Posted September 23, 2014 Author Share Posted September 23, 2014 Thank you all, it really means a lot. I thoroughly appreciate it. Quote Jon Matcho Builder & Canard Zone Admin Now: Rebuilding Quickie Tri-Q200 N479E Next: Resume building a Cozy Mark IV Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JETninja Posted September 26, 2014 Share Posted September 26, 2014 Thank you for all the effort in saving the great history of this website, and looking to keep it fit for the future. Hats off! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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