[DeTomaso] Chat with MWM (POCA forum worker)

[The DeTomaso Registry Guy]

I ran into Mark McWhinney recently. and we chatted about the POCA website
issues.

 

http://poca.com/

 

and the Forum (mail server) archives found here:

 

http://poca.com/pipermail/detomaso_poca.com/

 

What follows is from me and is not from Mark, per se, but my memory.

 

 As you probably know, the POCA website was hacked some time ago, and more
recently it started

spewing spam.  The ISP then added the site to their bad-guy list.  This
resulted in visits to the site being

denied.  This also affected the Forum (our e-mail distribution list).

 

Our Tech volunteers (Asa Jay, Mark, ???, and maybe others) are working the
issues.

Once they were able to convince the powers that be (ISP) that we were once
again in charge of our site,

the ISP cracked-open our spigot to allow a trickle of messages to be sent,
but with a significantly constraining

daily max of messages. (5,000).

 

To understand our volume, when one person posts a message, it is sent to at
least 600 subscribers. (likely more)

That would effectively limit us to around a max of 10 messages daily.

While this may suffice for the Apollo forum, we are a bit more active than
that.

 

Mark said they requested an increase in this constraint.

Naturally the ISP will monitor our out-put, and shut our service down if we
are flagged as spammers (again).

Thus the fix is a slow process of rebuilding "trust" with the ISP providing
service.

 

It may be that our current message-sent limit is 35,000, however, again
using 600 subscribers that is a 

limit of around 58 daily messages total.

 

My personal estimate of history shows we have had busy days with over 150
messages, the average may be nearer 58.

 

How or when do we reach the limit?  Not sure.  

It is not like all messages sent in the morning get out, with our message
door slammed shut by noon,

for example.   

 

For the time being, valid messages will, or should, make it to the archives
(link above).

 

So, how can we adjust our actions to improve the result?

 

Naturally, only sending DeTomaso (and related) content to the group helps.
Just use good judgment.

(I feel bad for sending a test message the other day.)

We can also help by saving truly NPC content for the future when our ISP
stops restricting 

our "thought - flow".

 

We can reduce the number of redundant replies and "me too" messages.

I suppose we could all switch to once-a-day message summary, but that is a
personal choice.

 

So for the near duration, let us try to keep our content 100% De-Tomaso
related, and we will all benefit.

 

I suspect it will not take long before our ISP removes the current
constraints.

 

As to the POCA website itself, that is a less rapid repair.  Mark said that
the hacker left his code in various areas

and Mark can not be sure there are not "turds" (my term) hidden about.  So
he sees that it is likely that someone (Mark ?!?)

will need to manually rebuild all the pages (sort of from scratch) to insure
there is not hidden code present once the 'new' POCA site

is up and running.

 

I personally have a good idea of the effort involved.  For as you may know I
run the De Tomaso registry.

So here is my related example:

 

I "migrated" from an old development environment (the tool one build a
website with) to a new one 3-4 years ago.

The old website building tool used non-standard features (placed code on
every page) which I have been manually removing or 

rewriting to reduce incompatibilities.  This means I have had to open, edit,
and save every page (5-15 minutes each), and the 

Registry has more than 6,000 pages! By the time I finish this task in a
couple of years, I will have to turn around and start all over, 

as about every 5-7 years one has to migrate to yet another website building
tool.  And so it goes.

 

Rebuilding or re-writing the POCA site will also take significant time by
our volunteer 'staff'.  

 

So if you are missing some forum mail, visit the archives (link above),
instead of running posting test messages.

 

Anyway, I felt my understanding of the situation greatly benefitted from my
chat with Mark, I hope you will benefit

from my summary.

 

Chuck

 

 

The De Tomaso Registry Guy

http://www.detomasoregistry.org/Members/ProvaMoMemMain.asp