There are some very aggressive, nasty pieces of malware out there lately. I post regulary on a proboards forum for auto racing. I am also very careful about what I do when one of those notices comes up (open task manager and shut Explorer down) but I still managed to get my lap top nailed twice in two weeks in the beginning of December. Each time was bad enough to where I had to have the hard drive wiped clean and get everything reinstalled. I missed the fun on Chrismas day, but I also find that my home computer where I run Vista Business 64 is less prone than my lap top to these things (and it runs XP).
[U][I][B]
So the question is what to do moving forward. We really have two remaining problems 1) It’s too easy for bots to pass the Captcha & security measures to register for a new account. 2) We don’t have money in the budget to hire a server guy.
One suggestion that was made was to charge a nominal amount of money for membership, say $5 per month. This would discourage hackers (and spammers!) from registering and (depending on the number of members willing to pay) provide enough money to hire a professional server manager.
What are your thoughts??[/QUOTE]
[/B][/I][/U]
john, you might want to take a look at www.kenrockwell.com this is a photography site that is set up with a donation button on each page explaining that these donations help to keep the site running. If you charged a monthly fee some people would be put off, If I had a choice of paying a monthly fee or a donation from time to time i would choose a donation,…
the monthly fee would turn me off but a donation would not,
when someone post a question for advice and receives that advice how much is that worth in a donation, I think you will find that more people would be willing to make an donation from time to time to help out that a monthly fee
john a simple button going into a paypal account would help out with the monthly cost of hosting
FOLLOWING POST FROM KENROCKWELL.COM
PLUG
[I][U][SIZE=“5”]
[SIZE=“3”]I support my growing family through this website.
If you find this as helpful as a book you might have had to buy or a workshop you may have had to take, feel free to help me continue helping everyone.
If you’ve gotten your gear through one of my links or helped otherwise, you’re family. It’s great people like you who allow me to keep adding to this site full-time. Thanks!
If you haven’t helped yet, please do, and consider helping me with a gift of $5.00.
The biggest help is to use these links to Adorama, Amazon, B&H, Calumet, Ritz and J&R when you get your goodies. It costs you nothing and is a huge help. These places have the best prices and service, which is why I’ve used them since before this website existed. I recommend them all personally.
Thanks for reading!
[/SIZE][/U][/SIZE][/I]
I will make a donation now if you send me a paypal account to help out with the cost
pm or email me
ken
It was definetly on the Forum section, I experienced it about 0300 EST. My virus program, AVIRA, immediatly shut off the forum.
German virus checker AVIRA is a free download or you can spend $20 and protect 3 computers for a year with their premium service, In my cheap skate experience, it beats, McAfee, Microsoft Live One.
[quote=john;23444]tengineer, please confirm that it was in-fact a page on the forum (as opposed to the blog or homepage) that you were visiting when the Java script hit.
Otherwise, I feel terrible about the trouble this caused. Please accept our apologies, we spent more time making sure we had back-ups and such than prevention, and that seems to have been a mistake.
John,
I have gcaptain ‘forum’ as a bookmark and I honestly do not remember if I clicked to a sub-topic from the forum page. I don’t think I did but I may be mistaken. At any rate there is no need to apologize. It was an unfortunate combination of things that allowed this, the primary one being my temporary disabling of my virus software! I know better than that but got over confident and/or lazy. Evidently the virus got into your system at about the same time I dropped my defenses. It was just an unfortunate combination of coincidences which made for an interesting Christmas. I really didn’t mind all that much as I enjoy hunting down and killing things that annoy me.
I’m just glad you’re back up and running.
Have a good new year, enjoy Korea.
tengineer
Ok, we fixed it here… just wanted to make sure the other sections weren’t causing problems as well.
I’ll certainly think about the donate button, it’s not a bad idea. But for the near future let’s just hope the gTrax iPhone app sells… if so a server manager is first on my wish list for the proceeds.
[QUOTE=john;23500] if so a server manager is first on my wish list for the proceeds.[/QUOTE]
Correction… second. After paying our current moderator, Mike, a decent salary… god knows he deserves it!!
John - There is an excellent web site for older John Deere garden tractors that has gone through the same growing pains. It was started in 2002.
They also went with the volunteer payment option through Paypal, and request an annual contribution of $10 (or more) per year.
The moderators there started it as a hobby, but it has far outgrown that status.