Thank you all for your patience as of late with the maintenance and upgrades to Amiga.org. Phase 2 of our three-phase plan is about to begin.
Important information follows, please read more
Of the three phases, Phase 1 was to upgrade our hosting system to make it more stable and ready to migrate towards the future. Lots of upgraded server libraries and software. You might have noticed short periods of slowness or downtime while we adjusted the new software. Sorry for any inconvenience. Phase 1 is complete and there have been no substantial reported problems in about 5 days.
Phase 2, which is set to begin in the next day or so brings Amiga.org itself the first real, major upgrade since we began running Xoops in 2001. We currently run a highly customized version of Xoops 1.3.x and we'll be upgrading to 2.0.5.x (or 2.0.6 if we get the chance).
What this means is;
- More features such as nested comments and "individual event notifications", meaning that you can enroll to receive updates -- either by PM or e-mail -- on individual events such as forum or news threads.
- New possibilities such as user blogging (your own personal Amiga.org page), events handling, team work coordination, and more.
- Uniqueness
Xoops 2.x also means that we can alter the site to make it much more personalized and much more unique than the other copycat sites which have sprung up as of late. Our system won't have to look and feel like every other Xoops site out there.
- Improved compatibility with older browsers
The Javascript used natively by Xoops (which, sorry, we can't get rid of) has also been improved and in testing with Amiga browsers, actually seems much more compatible than the Xoops 1.3 Javascript.
Now for the caveats...
Syndication to be replaced with more capable system
The current "syndication" block will be removed from the new system. We don't know yet, but we don't think it's compatible with Xoops 2.x yet. Xoops 2.x comes with it's own RSS feed schema which will be both prominent and more usable.
E-mail forwarding has been permanently disabled. I know for some of you, this is a major hassle and I apologize. You will need to change your e-mail addresses on any mailing lists or subscriptions that you currently have.
Essentially speaking, the new server upgrades brought a new control panel which is incompatible with manually managing e-mail forwards (as we had done earlier under the old server software).
The day we started the upgrades (and e-mail forwarding was disrupted) I became instantly aware of several major issues with providing such a free service. First and foremost is the sheer amount of SPAM that was being processed by the server. Even with SpamAssassin loaded, I'm still processing about 20,000 spam messages every day which it doesn't catch.
Even more troubling is the fact that several of you (and I know who you are) have been misusing Amiga.org's free e-mail forwarding to spread keyfiles and other pirated/pornographic materials, placing Amiga.org in very real danger of being permanently shut down due to DMCA and other law violations.
*If* I can find a way to bring Amiga.org's e-mail forwarding back, it will have to be in a manner that is both voluntary by the user and controllable by the administrative staff.
Comments? Constructive suggestions?
