<b>Posted by</b> Testing: Looking forward to it!

<b>Posted by</b> Gizmo: We've upgraded the forums to UBB.Threads 7.4 Final (from UBB.Threads 7.3); the major changelog (not including minor bugfix releases) for this update can be found here.

Several small features will be temporarily disabled until I can hack them back in; that should be completed shortly.

** Update (6:10p) ** - I think I got most everything added back in; I don't have BeyondCompare installed on this computer, so I'll do a larger check later on tonight to make sure ;)...

<b>Posted by</b> Gizmo: Well, other than coming down with a horrendous cold which has layed Trey and I completely out for the better half of the last week we've only gotten a few things done (which I think is semi understandable lol).

First, we've got a small local development machine reconfigured at home office; it took a bit of time to reconfigure the webserver how we had it before without any current backups, but I'm confident it's set as approximate as possible (as I've reused most of the items over sites in our network).

Secondly, thanks to the great donation of one of our client sites, we'll be coming into a Quad Core Vista machine with 4GB Ram; so it seems I'll need to get off my butt and prep some video editing work soon ;)... I'll be posting some specs on the machine when we get it later in the month.

The new machine also comes with a BluRay drive, so I can think of at least a couple of quick projects to do ;).

Lastly, I hadn't gotten around to that ReCaptcha update yet (it's been hectic as hell around here) but I am hoping to have the time to update the main contact scripts this week, and work on the submit content page as well (as it'll just link to other pages at this time).

As always, I value all input, so keep it coming, my email is always open (once you pass the challenge/response system anyhow)

<b>Posted by</b> Gizmo: Nothing much to report this week, mainly server upgrades for our server and a couple of affiliate machines.

August was a horrible month for hardware, we've had the items below burn out at home office:

[*]47&quot; LCD TV (now we get to do our gaming updates on a 15&quot; CRT TV!)

[*]2 of the boards on our 16 port Network Switch burnt out, so we have 7 useable ports (4 ports per slot + one uplink on board 4; thank god most of our machines have wireless capabilities, so it's not too huge of an issue that we don't need to immediately replace it)

[*]Cablemodem - Yes, my original Comcast modem from when we moved back here in 2003 FINALLY burnt out... Comcast promptly replaced it and we're back in business.

[*]512MB ram on our dev machine burnt out. We still have another 512 in her, however I neglected to backup the web directory before reformatting lol... So we'll need to restore from an older backup. Thankfully the DSH scripts where rolled out to the live server for testing several months ago, so I didn't loose everything on it.

One thing that I'm going to have to look into is building a new desktop for use here in Home Office; I haven't had one other than the dev machine for several years and in order to do the proposed items for some video and audio projects for both UGN, DSH, and Back of the Web I need to be able to work on a machine capable of editing video (as in something which actually supports SSE2 lol).

Unfortunately working on these sites isn't a money making opportunity so coming up with funding from out of nowhere is near impossible; so I'm hoping that some odd jobs come around so I can work on replacing what ended up burnt out and working on building a new PC; we'll see what happens, I'm hopeful :).

<b>Posted by</b> Gizmo: It's been a busy and stressful week here at UGN Security; unfortunately not much got completed as I've been sick.

I managed to get a few minor updates done to our new systems, as well as some backend work, but not much that you'd notice on the site.

I'm still planning to do my proposed updates to the contact page (ReCapcha) as well as updating the submit content page to reflect links to the new systems vs being a contact page as it is now.

<b>Posted by</b> Gizmo: It's been a busy week... Not only did I manage to scrape by with pushing out the Archive System but I also pushed out a Video Syndication System for those who want to publish videos that show on Yahoo, Google, MySpace, etc.

In the coming weeks I'll be working on not only inserting the old data from the old Archive and Knowledge Base, but I'll also be looking for some decent tutorials for the video script and I'll be working on some sub-sections that tie into all of the new toys...

Some of the sub-system work will include a way to &quot;report&quot; a published item, or comment on it.

I'm also going to be trying to make some time to work on updating the contact page to use the new captcha libraries, but I'm trying to hold back on that until I can update the jobs system.

Feel free to play with the new systems, and submit some content that you like! All of the &quot;submit&quot; pages are linked to from the main site, and we'll be checking the admin center for any submissions.

I hope you all have a good one, -Giz

<b>Posted by</b> Gizmo: Due to some network issues today I've been unable to post the announcement until now, so I apologize for the wait! (although due to complications involving a computer monitor and a mouse, I now need to replace the mouse... or find all pieces lol)

It's been a very busy week working on the Reviews System, but we've got it up and running, and working like a charm! The insertion page is a little more complicated than what I'd like, but it'll be worked on in the future ;).

I managed to get most of the review content off of the forums into the new system, however I've had some time constraints so I haven't been able to get the Music/Movies section inserted (as it requires more editing than time is allowing right now).

I started some rough work on next weeks update earlier tonight, the &quot;secret project&quot; will be visually pleasing for all ;)... You'll see it this next Humpday! hehe.

One update I'll be working on for the following humpday I can release, we'll be making it so you can respond to all of the items in the new sections; any comments will require both approval and capcha validation however. I've got the rough schema in place for this update, and an overall understanding of how I'm going to accomplish one system for each section, so it should be no sweat!

I hope you're all having a great summer, and enjoy the updates!

<b>Posted by</b> Gizmo: Well, it's been a long week finishing off today's new update... I'd like to introduce you all to the new Articles system. This will eventually take over for the current (and past) Knowledge Base.

This new system allows for ANYONE to submit articles (although they must be approved by an admin before showing on the main site). It has a SE Friendly (and SEO) URLs system built in (not to mention a sitemap for search engines), so any content displayed (and approved) will be promptly crawled.

We've added content that we've been working on from the Back of the Web Forums (one of our sister projects) and, after I get some time away from coding, will be trolling the forums looking for items which need to be posted.

I've tried my best to make the new system 100% xHTML/CSS valid, but I'm having a little difficulties with the BBCode parser currently but that'll have to be worked on after I get to the other systems I'm brewing up.

I'm going to be working on an entirely new system for this next humpday, I'm sure you'll all enjoy it ;)... It'll help clean up some sections on the forums and will again allow users to take charge in adding (or helping syndicate) content if they so choose to do so.

Until next week, have a good one :).

UPDATE (7:44 AM): It's been a productive night... I have most of one of the new systems complete due to being able to re-use some major code from the articles system; however I still need time for data entry, the public submission page, and to bug check; but next week's update may contain more than one system at this rate...

<b>Posted by</b> Gizmo: Well, it's been a slow week in regards to development; but it's been a very busy week in regards to the drawing board and back end development...

I am currently working out a template for both the Archive and Knowledge Base; they will no longer be a merged section when completed.

The Archive will host files, including a small local &quot;mirror&quot; of some of our favorite files and zines.

The Knowledge Base will actually be used for housing articles (a lot of which I've ended up creating this week, You can feel free to check them out on Back of the Web).

One item that I've been toying with is how to best display the initial &quot;index&quot; of files, and how to display categories within them (listing data out however will be quite simple as we've drawn those up before elsewhere in the network).

If you have any input on the changes you've seen lately, please let me know! It's the archived feedback from emails, vip lounge, and IRC that I'm looking at when making updates; so it's best to get your feedback or suggestions in asap!

Also, if you've got a topic that you'd like to see me cover, let me know and I'll draw up something for you... Your ideas may even make it into the launch of ./Hack (our &quot;in alpha&quot; video cast)!

I would also like to thank those of you who've donated their time and hard earned money, you've helped a lot more than what you'll ever know :).

<b>Posted by</b> Gizmo: We've decommissioned our Gallery1 install in favor of Gallery2; what does this mean for you? Well, your old gallery links no longer work, so you'll need to update your bookmarks...

I've also purged some of the galleries of users who haven't been around in a while (or that I couldn't differentiate actually where of our users and not drive by people who just wanted a free image host).

The new system is PHP/MySQL vs PHP/Flat File; which means we can do more with it in the future.

<b>Posted by</b> Gizmo: Today's Update Humpday marks the upcoming revision v4.5 of UGN Security... We recently discovered some not so secure holes in some 3rd party scripted sections of the site which we spent the last several days cleaning up (and introducing my new sanatization function which is nicely filtering all input on any form on the site).

I've also taken this time to work back a lot of the table work that was introduced in our last big overhaul... A lot of this work wasn't needed before as it can be done with div's and span's so I've taken the liberty of making step one away from tables... Though until I can get my anal retentiveness around a well functioning 3 column div that runs purely on CSS and plays nicely with min-height we'll be a little ways from there for the time being ;)...

I have also taken the time to introduce a newly renovated File Sharing section; it's now far easier to maintain so it'll be updated with newer torrent trackers more often. I've taken the time to add a good 8 more over our old set, as well as disable the ones which weren't working properly. One thing to watch out for however, Demonoid for some reason doesn't respond to &quot;ping's&quot; so it'll always show &quot;offline&quot;.

A lot of work went in to all of this weeks changes, so I hope you all enjoy... I still have some final touches to add before I actually go in and comment the site changelog about all of the page updates, but I'll get that out of the way tonight...

My planned changes for next Humpday include (at least) migrating our current CAPCHA implementation from FreeCap to ReCapcha; you can read about ReCapcha here.

Please note that I also plan to write up a quick &quot;how to&quot; about how to block bot's with ReCapcha as a simple project for those who've used other solutions in the past.

<b>Posted by</b> Gizmo: I've been mulling over the idea of when would be best to roll out updates and maintenance, most of our traffic comes at the beginning and end of the week, so what better time to roll out updates and maintenance than in the middle of the week...

So, here to you first... We'll be rolling out our major updates and maintenance every Wednesday... May it be morning, evening, or an insomniatic noon time jont, Humpday is our day ;)...

<b>Posted by</b> Gizmo: Today our ex benefactor canceled our irc server accounts (vs actually answering his phone or returning an email when we contacted him trying to take over payments).

We've had to sign up for a separate shell account with the same provider (it is reverse.net after all, a large efnet backbone) and have the old files restored on the machines.

It took a couple of hours to get everything sorted out, but we're back online with our shells.

I'd also like to thank our new IRC benefactor, who's a long standing member... Defcon :wavy:

<b>Posted by</b> Gizmo: Our IRC Server benefactor Phatal has today announced that he can no longer fund our IRC Chat project. I haven't decided what we're going to do regarding this change, and there aren't many options on the table right this second; but I'm open to suggestions.

-Edit: 7:22p- I've contacted the shell provider with the offer of free advertising in exchange for their services (our lowest outward hit count to an affiliate this month was 300 hits) but where declined (and not respectively at that)...

I've decided that we're just going to migrate over to another network; through searching on searchirc.com I've made my choice of FreeNode.

Our choices where: EfNet - Pro: Large network. Con: No chanserv functionality, easy channel takeovers, etc. UnderNet - Pro: Largest IRC Network online. Con: Very stringent policies. FreeNode - Pro: Large userbase, chanserv and nickserv, coding oriented. Con: ???

When the time comes that the shells are no longer operational I will be setting the cname on our irc hosts (irc.undergroundnews.com, irc.undergroundnews.net) to irc.freenode.net which will seem transparent to users irc clients.

Likely, you won't even notice a change, other than a minimmal downtime waiting for the dns prorogation.

If you own a channel, and would like me to set it up for you on the new server, please send me a PM or contact me on the IRC Server. I've moved over our #undergroundnews and #backoftheweb channels so far but am unsure as to what else is used by users currently.

<b>Posted by</b> Gizmo: The front page news display has been fixed; it's been down since the 7.3 upgrade and I've decided to go another route until the initial drawup could be fixed.