The changes will come as a response to the forum software that we use; bbPress which is being rewritten as a plugin to the blog/website software that we use; WordPress.  This change will make all our plugins and customisation to the forum rather useless.

However, I don’t intend to lose this data.  I intend to write or use existing WordPress plugins to meet what we have, but this will come later after I have satisfaction with the way the upgrade is working.

When will we upgrade?

bbPress 2.0 (the plugin to WordPress) will be released as stable at the end of June.  This is to match the release of WordPress 3.2.  I will not move Tartarus to this software stack until I am happy with its performance in testing.

Before I do upgrade this site to bbPress 2.0, I may upgrade it to bbPress 1.1.  Though I do not know the release date of 1.1, so I may skip it altogether.

What changes will happen?

This list is simply what I am anticipating.  Some of the items I can’t be sure about until the changes have been made to the live site.  But some of them I know are definitely going to change.

• Forum sub-domain change.
  • This is definitely going to happen because the forum will be inside WordPress, and it won’t be separate software that usually works best on its own domain access.
  • Redirection from http://forum.tartarus.co.nz will be put in place.
• Hopefully the damned 404-error that we often get on the large topics will go away.
• Theme will change.
• Plugins/features will be lost.  I expect this list to be lost, but I may get them back eventually:
  • Experience Points and badges
  • Extended Profile info
  • Tartarus Mobile + “via Tartarus Mobile”.
    • I will recreate this.
  • Topic icons, green text, mentions/replies, word filter, smilies.
• Tartarus Mobile.  This means will stop working on the current site until I create a version of bbPress Mobile that works with bbPress 2.0.  I intend to do this because I feel it is very useful.

There will definitely be others that I have forgotten to mention, but when I notice them I will state them.  Avatars will probably be kept considering that they’re already handled by a WordPress plugin.

From what I have read about the development of bbPress 2.0, there will be an importer of forums, topics, posts and users from bbPress 1.x.  This means that we should be able to keep all the content that we already have.  It will also means that we’ll still have the large threads to test whether the 404-error is less frequent or gone completely.

Benefits

I have touched on some of the technical benefits of upgrading to bbPress 2.0 above, and apart from being on new and up-to-date software, I know that some of the benefits are use-case scenarios.

By having bbPress 2.0, we’ll be able to integrate forum posts and topics within pages and blog posts.  We’ll be able to manage a system where users can do a bit more than just communicate on a forum.

When we planned the coup d’état to replace Tartarus: The Underworld with something new, we envisioned a new website that didn’t just replace Smile City’s forum while providing experience points and profile badges.  We envisioned a website that would have user-generated content.

We were hoping to create a system where users could write tutorials, reviews and other content.  We wanted a place where someone like Waireka or frup could offer GIMP tutorials.  Someone like StrikeFreedom could post game reviews and walk-throughs.  A site that was more than just a lightly moderated forum.

With the integration that bbPress 2.0 provides, I have hope that we might be able to achieve this.

Net Neutrality

From the capitalist agenda arises the issue of net neutrality (Or more accurately, the move away from it). This argument, raging in the boardrooms of major telcos involves changing the way we currently have access to data. Since the birth of the Internet any user could access any form of content with the same level of priority, certain corporations would love to change that.

In an effort to monetize or perhaps promote friendly services some companies wish to limit the access they provide to competing sites, protocols and services. Essentially one website may pay an ISP to gain preferential treatment and speed. Another ISP may block a rival companies services to promote their own. They may then artificially create premium services to gain full access and speed to content that was previously freely available.

This is marked contrast to the ideals formed with the creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee. As a vocal supporter of Net Neutrality, he considers “Threats to the Internet, such as companies or governments that interfere with or snoop on Internet traffic, compromise basic human network rights.”

Unnecessary crippling of services is ethically unsound. The reasons for this behaviour are not complementary to innovation and also involve systems being put in place to prevent the need to upgrade aging networks and low bandwidth.

Privacy

With the founding of the Internet came a new era in human communication. People across different continents gained the ability to communicate in real time. With the relative anonymity the Internet provided for communication, new ways of interacting began to develop. While for several years true anonymity has essentially been non-existent, with users happy to  provide personal details across the Internet on a daily basis, the only real threats to privacy involved the odd case of hacking and legitimate uses for law enforcement.

However, this anonymity has given ordinary people surprising power to previously easily suppressed voices. Recently we have seen how Internet services and cell phones have essentially allowed revolutions against corrupt dictators in the middle east. At the same time we are more and more aware of oppressive administrations fighting to control their populations access to Internet services [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. China is infamous for its filtering, censorship and propaganda. We hear stories of companies such as Google bowing to the respective government pressure to censor news and the information is always portrayed in such a way to suggest these problems do not affect those of us in the west.

One of the more controversial threats to privacy is the idea of forcing away the relative anonymity. Several pundits have raised plans for Internet ID systems. While the emergence of Facebook and other services now makes these ideas seem less crazy than they once did, the average user still has the choice to use Facebook or not. No doubt any ID scheme created would cause more identity fraud problems than it attempted to solve.

Censorship

Often censorship and filtering procedures are implemented in haste to curb high profile social issues such as preventing child abuse, a most noble cause. However in part due to the haste these regulations are written and perhaps ulterior motives of lobbyists the legislation is often created with much broader wording than is actually required.

In Australia a filtering system was put in place for this very purpose and those in charge of the system were famously shamed when the secret list of blocked websites was leaked and found to contain the website of an innocent dentist. A worrying premise.

As mentioned previously on Tartarus, as of March 2010 Internet filtering exists in New Zealand. We too have a secret list of filtered sites. How long will it before we have the websites of political parties, dentists and other innocuous websites.

The issue of censorship on the Internet is different to traditional broadcasting mediums such as television and radio. Television and radio are broadcast indiscriminate of who the audience may be. It is not unethical to censor certain content at certain times due to the possibility children may be watching the shows. With digital television and the ability to require pin codes to shows of certain ratings, this point is rather moot though. The Internet is in marked contrast to television and radio in that the user must actively search and choose the content they wish to obtain. In a free world, the user should be able to read whatever they wish.

A common argument in support of censorship is the risk that children will accidentally stumble across pornography and other information that is considered dangerous to their upbringing. There are many lobbyists trying to paint a picture that the Internet is a dangerous place and all children are doomed. However the risk to children is lower than sometimes put forward. The risk of accidentally stumbling across pornography is much lower than often suggested. The highest risk to children on the Internet appears to be more of a social nature, something that no blocking system can solve.

Filtering the Internet should not be the responsibility of the government. In fact, ideally they shouldn’t even have the power. Acceptable solutions exist by installing content-control software on home computers, allowing parents to choose how they raise their children and limiting the scope of unnecessary censorship. The European Union has the right idea when it comes to Internet filtering. They actually went and outlawed it.

The filtering systems that are put in place also served to markedly slow down the Internet, creating bottlenecks to access content. With such a small proportion of sites, most unheard of and illegal being the focus of the filtering, it seems unjustified to ruin everybody else’s experience.

File Sharing

In New Zealand we have recently had file sharing infringement clauses added to the respective Copyright Amendment Bill. The worrying part is not that this legislation will come in to effect, regardless of the arguments that can be made about failed business models and distribution methods. It is that this bill was issued under urgency by people who quite clearly had no understanding of the impact of the bill, what the bill did and the technology involved. In fact, only one MP clearly understood the situation and the ramifications.

This creates a dilemma that undermines democracy. If our elected leaders are so willing to create unpopular laws, that a significant amount of the population are against, under urgency so as to prevent submissions and discussion, how can we trust them to fairly operate content filtering systems. The introduction of this law saw a revival of the 2009 blackout campaign and a Facebook page – Opposing The Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill currently has over 10000 members. With this new law and attitude to democracy the potential for corruption is worrying.

Further to that are the worrying implications for our justice system, where the legislation requires the defendant to prove their own innocence, on claims which previously have been shown to be fairly dubious. Current identification techniques provide false positives at a rate of approximately 11%. With legislation requiring people to prove their innocence, as opposed to being presumed innocent until proven guilty, we can presume that 11% of those found guilty of file sharing will be innocent. The rate will no doubt be higher, with the named person of the account being liable for anyone else’s actions who also use the account.  This will create problems in flats, libraries, and all other examples of shared Internet connections.

Perhaps the most worrying issue of all is how these topics relate to the greater freedom and sovereignty of New Zealand as a nation. The changes being made do little to actually help New Zealand, and represent our country bowing down to foreign pressure in an attempt to solicit trade agreements.

Conclusion

Net Neutrality should be a right. It is unethical not to have a neutral net.

It is important that privacy is maintained on the Internet to stop oppression. Contrary to certain agenda, forced identification will likely result in more identity fraud.

Censorship should not be the domain of the government when it comes to the Internet and there are perfectly acceptable tools to achieve the same and better results in the home.

If the Internet is the last remaining bastion of democracy, we may be facing a time where the politics of the Pirate Party of New Zealand are necessary.

The block page states that your IP address and location have been logged and provides a form to appeal the website block.  It also links to more information about the filter.

Clearly the Digital Child Exploitation Filtering System is either easily hacked by trolls or way out of scope and the Government is using it for censorship of material that isn’t directly related to protecting children from sexual abuse.  The filter goes against the principles of privacy, freedom and government transparency and severely disrupts the flow of traffic in New Zealand.

Tech Liberty NZ has some interesting information about the filter.

April Fools’: All the website appeals were sent to master5o1′s website and can be viewed here.

Starting on the 23rd, I will have more time to work on the code of the plugins that we’re using.  The plan is basically to start by the deactivation all the plugins and figuring out which one or ones are potentially causing this problem, and then try to optimise them.

What makes this difficult is that the problems that people are having cannot easily be forced to occur.  On the development version of Tartarus, I have never had a Page Not found error, and I rarely get them on the forum.

Hopefully this will fix the error.

“via Tartarus Mobile”

Not related to the 404 error, I have submitted my XMLRPC Client Info plugin to the bbPress plugin browser.  This will allow others to have a “via Client” on posts made through from an XMLRPC client, e.g., bbPress Mobile.

I have also submitted a ticket to patch the xmlrpc.php file in bbPress so that a poster’s IP address made through an XMLRPC client like bbPress Mobile can be passed through to the bbPress forum.
Without this patch, all posts made through bbPress Mobile would have the IP address of the server hosting bbPress Mobile.  This is bad for post moderation and administration.

We were going to let it slip in quietly, but something prompted us to tell everyone about it:
Replying to @donkeycheese‘s post:

And apart from that, I came for the pussy. It’s been a fuckign drought since I got here, but I’m sure with my experience points now at 100, admin is posting me some as we speak

So… I guess we’re sending you pussy, Tartarus style. I’m sorry we couldn’t do any better, this is a forum, not a mail order bride service.

How does it work?

Basically, when you get to 100 experience (having logged in for a sum of 100 days), you gain the ability to hide the advertising on the forum. Now, our advertising isn’t too obstructive and it doesn’t even cover the bills, but we will allow you to hide it all for 80 days.

You access the option by editing your profile as follows:

As usual, we’re always open to suggestions so if you can think of other cool ways to award and use experience, we’ll definitely implement the ones we like.

Progress on the 404 issue.

As we’re all aware, the forum experiences an issue at times of heavy server load where the pages of the forum are listed as non-existent. We’re trying to solve this problem, but it is fairly difficult. To make the site we use WordPress and its forum derivative bbPress. We believe the issue may be in the integration of these. In terms of what the software should be able to handle, and what the server should be able to handle, we don’t think the problem is justified. It seems to occur when only 15 or so people are viewing the forum at once.

The forum is unique in that it experiences a lot of refreshing, so while we only have about 80 people viewing the forum per day in what constitutes about 500 visits, we’re getting thousands of page views. Naturally there is a bit of strain on the server.  At this point we don’t think that merely upgrading our hosting should be needed, or would necessarily solve the problem.

What we think is happening is that bbPress is overloaded, so the integration with WordPress takes over. WordPress doesn’t contain the pages that bbPress has, so takes over and says “The page doesn’t exist!”. Refreshing usually solves this problem, but it has the catch-22 of putting more load on the server… we’re even starting to experience HTTP://500 errors. This is probably because there is so much refreshing going on that the server is starting to drop packets.

We’ve tried a few soft fixes, and they haven’t really worked. The next thing we’re going to try to do is see if moving the forum in to a different subdomain, so that the catch-all WordPress seems to be doing won’t happen. This could work well or horribly, we can’t know, and the only way to test it is with everyone as guinea pigs. Sorry. The problems that could occur are that hard-coded links with in forum quotes and replies will break and that the problems that are already happening might get worse.

If the change to a different subdomain doesn’t fix the problem we’re going to have to try something more radical and it could take quite a while to fix. Trust us, we’re really not happy about it!

Instead of enforcing rules like other forums we have tried to create guidelines that positively encourage the desired behaviour. The guidelines already represent the general manner of posting in the forum.

While the vast majority of content within the terms and conditions are to prevent our site possibly getting in trouble with our web host, the posting guidelines are aimed at keeping the peace and quality of forum posts at a respectable level. The terms and conditions are as liberal as possible while keeping with the ethos of Tartarus.

http://maxcdn.thedesigninspiration.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Silicone-Soul-l.jpg

Smile City

You served us well.  Some of us made friends there, some of us made enemies.  It’s the forum which made Tartarus come to exist.  If it wasn’t for the over the top and unreasonable
moderation, Tartarus may never have existed.

Smile City has spurred many forums that I can remember.  There was “Fugley’s Freedom Forum,” Zambucka, Tartarus: The Underworld, and this, Tartarus: The After Effect.  There are probably several more, but I don’t know or remember them.

Although the forum is closing, they’ve opened a free hosted forum called NZ Forum.  Personally I think this is an insult to Smile City’s forum user base.  Being offloaded from a supported, private forum to a third-party, free hosted, non-customisable forum is an outrage.

Tartarus: The After Effect welcomes the rise in membership due to the closure of Smile City’s forum.

Plugins

Although some of the original ideas that we had have not been realised, Tartarus has still achieved some interesting goals.  Tartarus runs on a heavily modified (through plugins) version of bbPress and WordPress.  We have developed eight plugins for bbPress, although most likely not necessary, it’s just more fun that way.

A segment of code from the Tartarus word filter plugin

Out of the eight plugins that I have created, it is ironic that the Tartarus Filter plugin is my favourite.  It is ironic because I personally do not believe in censorship, yet my favourite plugin implements a word filter.

It is not the function that makes it my favourite.  It is the programming.  I think it is the best plugin that I have programmed.

Another plugin is the Badges plugin.  It was actually the first one that I created for bbPress, and formed the starting point for the Tartarus Experience plugin.  The Experience Points system hasn’t really gone anywhere, but I’m not too worried.

Tartarus Mobile

Since April 2010 when the idea of The After Effect was first discussed, we decided that a mobile version would be desired.  When it came to launching the website I ignorantly thought that simply adding a second instance of bbPress to another sub-domain or folder, and changing the configuration and theme would achieve the goal of a mobile version of the forum.

Browsing the Recent Discussions list of topics on Tartarus Mobile

Sometime later I discovered the WordPress app for Android, and learnt how it communicated with one’s website instance of WordPress.  I became interested in the XML-RPC APIs for WordPress and bbPress.  I searched through the Internets for a XML-RPC version interface to bbPress, nothing of relevance ever came up.  So, I did what any programmer would do, invent.

Tartarus Mobile QR Code

It was only with the knowledge of the APIs that I could create the bbPress Mobile software, but that wasn’t enough.  I still needed to know how to use the API.  This was solved easily by finding the XML-RPC for PHP library, with that it was just a matter of coding it.

I plan on releasing the code for the bbPress Mobile and the plugins that I have created on my website.  I haven’t managed to get around to doing that yet, but I do plan on it.

Everyone has probably just glossed over this because it’s far too geeky for them, but that’s why I’m the programmer here in the team.  I’m the one who fixes the problems that you (may have) found, that I created in the first place. And I’m the one that adds the new features that you’ve been asking for.

Nerdy posts are better than old posts.

Robin Brooke appears to have been the topic of discussion for this week. While PT11 ended her opening thread with the statement “Stupid lil bitches..and a dirty old bastard, not a good combo.” It appears that this is exactly what is required for a popular thread on Tartarus! But as quickly as the thread rose to the top, it also fell.

Again threads around crime and justice seem to invoke discussion. The topic around smoke-free prisons was obviously popular, though without most of the controversy perpetuated by the media.

The confessions thread remains the most popular and a number of other items appear to becoming recurring topics.

For those of you who like statistics, here is the current tally of figures we are able to keep track of:

• Active registered members: 63
• Average unique visitors per day: 100  (The first time a person visits a site per day)
• Average visits per day: 269 (A new visit is when a persons session data has cleared)
• Total unique visitors: 566 (The first time a person has visited the site)
• Totals visits: 4,364
• Page views: 80,362 (Total of every page refresh)
• Posts per day: 322
• New topics per day: 13
• Total topics: 222
• Total posts: 5492

Further Features

Implemented this week was a word filter. This is a personal way of censoring words you may not want to see. You can also choose how these words are displayed, whether just stared out or changed to words you feel more suitable. Hopefully that makes this site just a little bit more safe for work for those that need it.

Changes were made to the HTML in the menus and hopefully that has fixed any of the problems that there were. We are responsive to feedback so please let us know if something is still working incorrectly.

Like Tartarus on Facebook if you want to share the site with your friends!

Finally, as some of you may be aware we have a system in place for adding badges to a member’s profile. Currently the only badge that is displayed is the First Day badge for those members who registered on the first day the new domain was made public. If you have any suggestions for badges speak up in the forum. Ideas don’t make themselves.

Source: http://bymichaelo.com

Well we’ve been operational now for a week and I would like to thank all of you for making it a great one. The first week saw over 50 users join, 2000 visits and over 41,000 page views. The response has been far better than expected. During the week we sneakily added a new feature that allows you to “like” a post on our forums on Facebook. This is a great way to share a thread you like with other people. We’ve also fixed a few of the bugs that were mentioned such as the menu problems in Internet Explorer and problems with smilies posting properly. If you notice anything annoying or have an idea for a new feature, do tell us, we’re listening.

Week In Review

This is a new aspect of the site we plan to try keep happening. The best posts/ threads that are noticed may get mentioned especially if there are some great quotes!

The first week saw discussions about Crime tagged the most. These weren’t necessarily the most popular discussions however with the Confessions thread ruling supreme.  Also popular were the quirks and food threads. While most of the discussions seem relatively light-hearted there are hints of some serious discussions and debates occurring in the future.

If there are any excellent posts made, post them in the Quote of the Day thread. Each week we will skim posts from this thread as nominations for the best weekly post. The best weekly post may be included in the weekly review (with suitable context)

Post Away!

Source: http://www.korenshadmi.com/_personal/