Forum blocking IP addresses

[indolering]

If I can get the Vanilla forums to give us a free pro/cloud account, will the relevant power that be move us to that infrastructure? They actually do research on community building and the UX, moderation, and spam filters are much better than what we have here. There is also a special Q/A format which would be helpful for technical discussions.

[biolizard89]

If I can get the Vanilla forums to give us a free pro/cloud account, will the relevant power that be move us to that infrastructure? They actually do research on community building and the UX, moderation, and spam filters are much better than what we have here. There is also a special Q/A format which would be helpful for technical discussions.

Would we be able to export all our data and switch providers at will?

[indolering]

If I can get the Vanilla forums to give us a free pro/cloud account, will the relevant power that be move us to that infrastructure? They actually do research on community building and the UX, moderation, and spam filters are much better than what we have here. There is also a special Q/A format which would be helpful for technical discussions.

Would we be able to export all our data and switch providers at will?

Yes.

[biolizard89]

If I can get the Vanilla forums to give us a free pro/cloud account, will the relevant power that be move us to that infrastructure? They actually do research on community building and the UX, moderation, and spam filters are much better than what we have here. There is also a special Q/A format which would be helpful for technical discussions.

Would we be able to export all our data and switch providers at will?

Yes.

That link covers importing to Vanilla, I meant can we export from Vanilla if we change our mind later?

[indolering]

Would we be able to export all our data and switch providers at will?

Yes.

That link covers importing to Vanilla, I meant can we export from Vanilla if we change our mind later?

It contains info on exporting as well. Vanilla is the forum equivalent of Wordpress, they won't lock our shit up

[biolizard89]

It contains info on exporting as well. Vanilla is the forum equivalent of Wordpress, they won't lock our shit up

A quick Google suggests that we would have to ask tech support for an exported dump, rather than a self-serve setup like WordPress.com. That makes me kind of nervous, as I'd suggest weekly backups, and I don't know if their tech support people would like such a frequent task.

http://vanillaforums.com/discussion/207 ... forum-data
https://vanillaforums.com/discussion/28 ... forum-data

[indolering]

Mix yourself a drink and relax then ;p They perform nightly backups and I'm sure that their backup procedures are more robust than whatever we have now.

However, if you are still worried about their entire datacenter will get hit with an EMP and their nightly backups and cold storage backups happen to all become corrupted they are willing to provide such backups once per month. Yes, I know, blackswan and whatnot, but it be at most one month of lost forum conversations.

[domob]

I have to agree with biolizard89: No matter how professional they may handle backups and everything, I would still not want to be dependent on a third-party company to keep our data (and keep it hostage should they decide to do that for whatever reason). Just makes me nervous, and I would really like to have the forum hosted on a community server rather than a professional offering unless we can do backups ourselves regularly.

[indolering]

I have to agree with biolizard89: No matter how professional they may handle backups and everything, I would still not want to be dependent on a third-party company to keep our data (and keep it hostage should they decide to do that for whatever reason). Just makes me nervous, and I would really like to have the forum hosted on a community server rather than a professional offering unless we can do backups ourselves regularly.

This type of paranoia is why I am very glad you guys are working on the important, low-level stuff. Ignoring small security problems for decades in favor of practical engineering decisions is how we got into the mess we have with the NSA and censorship problems we have on the web.

But if this whole thing hinges on the ability to get weekly vs monthly sql dumps, I would like to point out that the login form for the forum is not encrypted, the TLS cert is a year out of date and the keys were generated using the flawed random number generator Debian back from 2008, and Apache, PHP, MySQL, as well as MediaWiki are all missing security patches.

I'm not saying 3rd party hosting doesn't have problems: it certainly does. But at least they have engineering staff dedicated to these things.

Right now, each one of us has something more important to work on than tweaking spam filters and patching the forum software. I just don't think we should be running the forum until we have someone who is dedicated to just managing community relations.