Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Knowing that a number of the moderators and/or super users are involved on both this forum and the referenced forum (http://www.oooforum.org) , can anyone provide an answer as to what is causing the down-time on oooforum.org ??
Over the last several days, it has gotten to the point it's never accessible. Just wondering.

thinman3

It may be the very reason why we have set up this forum: perhaps the maintainer has lost interest in his forum.
Or it may be that he forgot to pay the fee for the domain name. It has happened at least twice in the past.

But if it doesn't come back within a couple of days, it will be a real loss with all the code snippets that were stored there.

Thanks for the reply Hagar...what with all the spamming that was going on, figured maybe there was some sort of orchestrated DoS being run. Didn't know of the past history so I guess anything is possible.

Have a good day....

thinman

See also End of oooforum.org?, 2 years ago!

There is a long topic in the oooforum about its management and the discussion that led to the creation of this forum (but well, not very useful when that discussion is off-line...).
For the record: OOoForum.org (several discussions about oooforum in the Community forums).

Somebody should write a script to load all old Code Snippets topics and save them, that should be possible.

WOW !! Was totally unaware of the history of the two forums ; quite informative. It brings clarity to an answer I (scsisys) received on the OOo forum concerning the spamming problem.

From what I read, I take it that there is no way to contact those OOo posters who were being assisted with their questions to let them know they should post to this forum for resolution ? Sad, if there is no avenue .

Thanks for the responses.

thinman3 / scsisys

EDIT>>>. 10-25-2012 20:53 CDST ....just clicked on the other forum link and it's up at this time...unfortunately, one can't access any of the posts. That was short lived...up for maybe several minutes and now down...

Seems to be fine now.
I bet it was the delay in paying the charges for the domain name.

The oooforum.org is nearly always slow in the morning (UK time). I've just come to this forum while the other decides to load. Sometimes it speeds up with calls to the server; if it doesn't spam deletion is an even greater pain than usual. I wonder if the site isn't hosted as a low priority site. That said, I've noticed this one isn't too fast at times.

For the record, I found the thread I was looking for with the whole history (18 pages long...): The forum's future - how many care?

florisv wrote:Somebody should write a script to load all old Code Snippets topics and save them, that should be possible.

I plan on archiving the code snippets from OOoForum.org. I already have a list of pages to archive (507 of them) and I will download them slowly, using a script.

At the moment I'm a bit busy, so I'll only download the code snippets and I might publish the archive in a few weeks (maybe a month or so).

Edit: At the moment the server's gone down again, just before I wanted to start.

It's back to as bad as ever, or worse.

What do you mean? For spam volume or response time?
Seems to be down again right now...

Edit: Recorded times when offline or with huge problems: - Oct. 25 - Oct. 31 - Nov. 4 - Nov. 5 - Nov. 9 - Nov. 10 - Nov. 15 - Nov. 23 (and may be other days before, haven't checked since several days

I meant accessibility. It just isn't accessible at all, and it keeps logging me out.

Still the same, if Terry still has that back-up, maybe it's time to convert that to a read-only version.

Situation is hopeless today, I did manage to log in, but after clicking two links, I was kicked out again.

I have a read-only version of all of the topics as well as a forum topic listing (all in HTML), but it's currently missing topics that have multiple pages inside it. The oooforum.org site seems to be down again at the moment but I hope to provide an offline download for anyone who wants it in the next few days.

OK, I have a backup of the OOoForum.org code snippets forum and all topics inside it if anyone wants it. PM me your email address if you want me to send via email. It's not perfect, because the links in the topic pages are almost all broken. But I've created index pages with links to all of the topics, sorted by date, name or author.

The file is 2.6MB with MD5 99a34f9d5aa7e497e23d18e481beb46e.

Good job, thank you for that. Now it's a matter of deciding what to do - publish or not. I'm for building a static set of html pages for reference purposes- there's no real need to convert it to bb code and add the pages to this forum, for instance.

floris v wrote:Good job, thank you for that. Now it's a matter of deciding what to do - publish or not. I'm for building a static set of html pages for reference purposes- there's no real need to convert it to bb code and add the pages to this forum, for instance.

I'm all for publishing it - none of the posts are mine and I'm sure the people who posted would want their work to be useful to others. At the moment I have no way of publishing the file though.

Converting from HTML to BBCode might be possible, but perhaps a little more involved. I think having the HTML copy of the pages is a good start, even if it's not ideal. That way anyone can fix it up later on.

Edit: Read the posts below, my response was a little hasty.

Another issue is, of course, where and in what form the info will be hosted.

I'm not qualified to give anyone legal advice, or any advice at all one way or the other really, but since the legality of what you're proposing is unclear (at least), it would be better if you discuss it somewhere other than this forum.

We decided against doing anything like this because the legal status of the content didn't seem at all clear, and no one was comfortable with taking it without permission in any case. Scraping content from a web site without permission is generally not cool and could be illegal.

acknak wrote:We decided against doing anything like this because the legal status of the content didn't seem at all clear, and no one was comfortable with taking it without permission in any case. Scraping content from a web site without permission is generally not cool and could be illegal.

Yes, I have thought about that. The posts would be copyrighted to the people who wrote them. If any of the authors objected to my sharing of their posts I would be happy to remove them from the backup (I'm sure I could find a way to automatically do it). That still doesn't exactly make it legally sound though.

My intention of providing the offline backup of the code snippets isn't to undermine OOoForum.org, but to ensure that the posts which have been made over the years remain useful to people who need them.

On a side note, I know there are at least a few posts that are available under the GPL or another free software license, which means there's no legal uncertainty in distributing them.

But I generally agree with you. I won't make a public copy of the files, at least until I can get some more information.

I wasn't suggesting that we publish without permission, and I agree that using content from a functioning website is not a cool thing to do. OTOH, abandoning a website that has received so many valuable contributions from so many people isn't cool either. It's good that we have at least a back-up, so that if the forum owner decides to discard the whole forum, the code snippets are safe.

Edit: Currently, the situation is so bad that the last 50 new members are from 13th December till today, even the spammers are struggling to get through. When the server was still functioning somewhat normally, there'd be an increase of dozens or more per day.

DNS service for this domain has expired with DNS Made Easy

Can't remember seeing that one before.

Maybe a fee problem only. Let's wait a couple of days. If nothing new, then I fear it will be the end.

The old forum is back. Reportedly the problem was due to a wrong expiry date on a credit card. Also reported that new anti-spam measures are to be put in place.

Where, where?

The comments were in a mailing on the Apache dev list, and the old forum is currently working (I've just checked). You may need to clear browser cache to get it.

I noticed that it's on line again. And it's about time the owner does something about the spam, or he might just as well delete it and allow others to host the significant content, like the code snippets, somewhere else.

I was told that the server is frequently attacked by bots of all kinds, and that the owner was in the process of reviewing needed changes to resolve the issues; or at least understand them.

It is my opinion, that the site owner is very busy and that any changes will require significant effort and time.

Sadly, the site is frequently not usable, and will likely alternate between usable and not usable until changes are made.