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Jul 2001 PDF Archive
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Site News & Updates...
I had decided to put the news and updates here but, obviously, not much of it had made it over. So, I added some of the entries from the Announcements section in the forum. If you would like to see the ones I didn't add, click on the link.
BratGirl 
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News for July, 2002...
We have begun to purge non-active member accounts. Here's a copy of the email non-active members will receive with about six weeks to respond before their accounts would be deleted. Please see details here.
BratGirl
_______________________________________________________
From : OUAP Writers Site & Forums
To : BratGirl at ouap@bratgirlcentral.com
Subject : OUAP Forums Account
Hi, BratGirl!
We have recently begun the arduous process of narrowing our
members database down to members who have posted within
the last three months, or to those who have requested we
reserve their accounts if they need to be away longer
than three months. We feel that, without this, the extra
adminstration such a high percentage of inactive users
cause will really get out of hand as our community grows.
As you have not posted at the Once Upon A Paper Writers
forum for several months, I would like to invite you back
to become an active part of our community. Please respond
to this email by either posting at the forum (your log-in
info is below), or by returning an email to:
ouap@bratgirlcentral.com
We have decided that members who have never posted
(within three months of joining) will not be notified
before the deletion of their accounts. But many of you to
whom this email is being sent were once active members of
our forums. Please respond by late September, 2002 to
retain your membership at The Once Upon A Paper
Writers Site & Forums.
Thank you.
BratGirl - Site Manager of OUAP
_______________________________________________________
Your OUAP Account Info:
UserName - BratGirl
PassWord - MMMmmmMMMMmmmMMm
blahblahblah an` blabin` (I can add a personal note here)
---------------------------------------------------
The Once Upon A Paper Writers Site & Forums
http://www.bratgirlcentral.com/ouap
Please Share Your Art With Us!
News for March 25, 2002...
*SIGH* Just moved to another host (yeh, again). Cancelled the last within the ten day grace period so will get my money back, and went in on some better hosting with a friend. The idea was to keep the forum on the one till the DNS changes went through, scoot the forum over, set the permissions and voila! But.. Well, it wasn't so easy. *HEAVY sigh* Turned out the new server has a different file ownership hierarchy so all the testing I did with a test forum before the move was for nought. After the change, I spent several hours fooling with the same test forum on the new host. I could get all working but 'Search', the admincenter, and (this the worse) new member registration. I finally installed a new test forum and that worked.. IkonBoard is just plain psycho! All my permissions were matched and the moved one would still not work So. I ran the install over the top of it (it gives the option if you are upgrading to keep your settings), pasted the page info from one of the raw files from a backup and.. GOT INTO THE ADMIN CENTER! At that point, all I had to do was change my font sizes back (they were the only thing that didn't stick) change a couple permissions and do some testing!!! All is working now. Sorry I didn't give any warning this time.. Heh. But I really did think we would only be down about a half an hour or so..
BratGirl
News for March 14th, 2002...
Hi Everybody.
For those of you who haven’t been to Once Upon a Paper for the last few days,
this may be news. For those who have tried to come by, here’s the explanation
of the various error pages you have seen. Since August of 2001, we have hosted
with a webhosting company called Dellz. These guys, though obviously had some
issues, were not too bad and the price was low enough to ‘stick it out’. Their
customer support has really been lacking and they did have a crash of an actual
server awhile back. As that kind of thing really does happen and, between my
backup and their’s, only a few hours of data was lost, this was forgivable as
they had a back-up and kept me up to date on what was happening. In the
last several weeks, they have decided to go with a plesk interface (a type of
website/account configuration software) and have been very inefficient and
incompetent in the implementation of this. They finally did get the move done
and I managed to fumble my way through it without their help. The forum was back
up and, other than the admin-center and the regular search, it was working. Even
so, I was willing to stay with them simply because this forum is very important
to me and I didn't want the down-time it would involve to lease another webhost.
But, more than 48 hours ago now, bratgirlcentral.com disappeared 8*( I waited
a bit, checking my email and obviously their icky new web software wasn't working
right (even non-forum pages loading so slow the graphics were lost) but it didn't
come back up. I was able to go in through FTP still and managed to download all
of the forum and I already had back-ups of the rest of the site so I have it all,
and nothing was lost. I won't go into to detail about the hassles I've had the
last couple days... Let's just say my domain is back but OUAP is nowhere to be
seen, and no explanation has been provided. I don't want to put the forum back up
on this host again. Not after all this fiasco, because the next time this type of
thing happens I might not be able to get back in to get it. So. Well. I went
looking for another host and have decided to host with an ecommerce site. What
this means is faster and waaay more professional. They guarantee 99% up-time,
do a nightly tape back-up and have a lot of other added stuff like 15gb's of
bandwidth (we have six here) and scripted tools that will make my duties quite
a bit easier... It is a bit more expensive, but not much. And, like I said when
I moved OUAP from free-hosting, it definitely won't break the bank! The transfer
can take up to three days, but the domain is mine so the URL's will be the same.
Also, as the 'network' location will be different, you will need to re-log in to
re-create the auto-log in cookies. Anybody who needs their passwords or member-name
info, please email me at bratgull@yahoo.com and I will get it to you as quick
as I can (please be sure to provide me with clues as to which member you are!). I
am going to send this statement as an email to all the members of OUAP. Please,
anyone who has never posted or has not posted in a long while, let me know as soon
as you can whether or not you wish to remain a member of the Once Upon A Paper Writers'
Forum. My guess as to when we will be up and running again is this Sunday (Mar. 17)
morning for the earliest, and Tuesday (Mar. 19) afternoon for the latest. Thank you.
BratGirl
News for November 13, 2001...
Webhost Was Down and some data was lost... 8*(
Here's a copy of the email I sent to all (as far as I know) active members. I've restored what I can... I figure we're missing about 17 hours of data... What that was I don't know as I was at work when it went down, but read this and know for certain that everything was done and consider how much worse it could have been (like if the backups, mine and theirs, were older... or if there had been no back up?) *tired, yeh*
_____________________________________________
11/13/2001 7:44:57 PM
OUAP was down...
Hi All..
Just wanted to let you know that my webhost lost some very crucial hardware over the last 24 hours and that we lost data from Sunday, Nov. 11th and after. Read their lastest email below. Their backup was actually Sunday the 11th, 2am and the backup that I made, BEFORE I did the lastest updates was Sunday at 7:15pm 8*( I'm pretty sure I had all the members and I'm hoping there wasn't a lot of posting between those times... Once Upon A Paper will be closed for at least an hour (realistically a couple hours) while I restore the data between Sunday 2am and 7:15pm (please tell me anyone who might have posted stories in that time frame MADE BACKUPS!!!) Honestly, I am completely bummed about this but, let's face it, it could be a helluva lot worse! *Brave smile* 8*)
-BratGirl
__________________________________________________
Date: 14 Nov 2001 02:06:55 -0000
From: helpdesk
To: bratgirl@bratgirl.f2s.com
Subject: Online
Dear Customers,
We would like to inform you the server is back online. Please open any support tickets about any problems you may have concerning permissions of any sort. The backup was current as of Sunday November 12th 2:00 AM in the morning. The server went down around 4:30 PM so any data loaded between those times may not be present.
Once we receive all the details from IBM as to what happened, we will compile them and send out an informational email. As for those wondering if every customer was affected, no, not every customer was affected as we currently run 3 DNS servers and will be adding more backup systems so stay tuned for any further instructions
As a note, any email sent to email addresses during this downtime will not be lost. They are stored on the server the emails were sent from for usually 5 days before being declared undeliverable. Hence, they will be arriving over the next few hours.
We will be emailing you all again when more data is available to us and we graciously thank each and every one of you for your patients. Please realize this was not the negligence of Dellz.com ability to administer a server, rather a extreme fluke due to the RAID system failing along with hard drives and the reasons are still being investigated. We invest in high quality equipment and we are as frustrated as each and every one of you are.
Thank you
News for November 6th, 2001...
The Writers Links page is up and running and hopefully has some good resources that you can takeadvantage of. Check them out and let us know if they are good or not. If you have any good online resources that aid you in your writing and think they shouldbe posted here, then just let us know about it and up they go!
~ Djinn
News for September 13, 2001...
And The New City Burns... September 11th, 2001
To be afraid is to let them win.
To react with uncontrolled anger is their victory.
To fight terrorism with terrorism would be our doom, all of us, not just America.
It wasn't just America that was attacked. It wasn't just New York, or Washington, or Pennsilvania.
But the whole World, our Mother, was wounded this day.
And all of Humankind was harmed, all of us, not just Americans.
My heart breaks at the horror of it all, and at the 'let's bomb everybody' reaction that seems to be the trend.
I wish we could make them understand that our only hope in this is by pulling together and exacting justice.
Not by becoming the evil that caused it.
Be well this night my friends, my family, my fellow Country men and women, and all my brethren who share with me this most fragile thing, our World.
Somehow we all have to survive this.
Somehow the right choices must be made.
And for ourselves, our children, and our children's children, we must win!
BratGirl
News for August 12, 2001...
I GOT MY OWN DOMAIN!!!! *YIIIIIIPPPPPPPPPPPPEEEEEEEEEEEEE* Ahem. I just got completely (and thoroughly!) disgusted with this derned thing going down all the time! Price was fantastic too! Got the domain for ten years ($6.95 per year) and the site (150 mb's FAST) for about $5.00 a month! Won't break the bank *weak laugh* The home site is already moved over. The forum will be (the whole thing) probably by the end of next weekend. All memberships will transfer. All you will have to do is go through the home page (forum link will be the first updated after the move). I will also have redirects on the two sites we've been using (three if you count the old pop-up forum ).
Smilies Project is DONE! *HAPPY DANCE* Click link at the bottom of the page. Try to completely avoid the 'Emoticons are enabled' link on the post-page as that crashes the board... CHECK 'EM OUT!!! *proud smile*
BratGirl
News for July 28, 2001...
The new forum is up and running... It does have some problems. F2s is using new servers and they warn that there may be some 'down times'. I've seen a little of this, but they seem to bring it back quickly (sometimes almost immediately) and they assure us that this will be a temporary inconvenience. Still, this is a small price to pay for no advertising and, in particular, NO POPUPS! I'm in the process of trying to find an easy hack to allow us to use images in our sigs. The main problem is that my ftp program won't allow me to copy from the site and the inner folders can't be reached by other means. Once I can safely backup the current contents, I'll try the hacks that allow images in sigs, another one for unlimited size on the avatars, and another that will correctly show the logged IP's (doesn't work right now). Let me know if you have an avatar image you want me to upload for you. Right now we'll have to keep these small, but a small image is better than none. If you are having problems of any kind, or if you see something I'm missing, let me know that too. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, let's make this place happen!
BratGirl
News for July 10, 2001...
I am completely bummed about the pop-ups the forum site has put up. Ever since they did, I've been scrambling to find another one. Problem is, all the 'plug-ins' like the one we're using have the pop-ups... My friend Shadow gave me a forum to use, but I can't get past the errors and he is very busy right now. Could be a long time before he'll have the time to straighten it out... For some reason, I'm very impatient to get a workable forum set up. Obviously, it's an extremely important feature of this site and what we are trying to do here. I downloaded some software (Ikonboard among them, the one Shadow uses). Then I ran into the dilemma of not only lacking the skills to use the stuff, but the major problem not having a web server...
Heh. Weellllll, I might have found a host. A free one so there will be ads, but hopefully not pop-ups! *Grrrrrrrr* I'll load the software and give it a try... Probably test it for about a week to make sure no pop-ups appear. If they do (*double grrrrrr*) I might consider a payhost that will let me load the software and run it from their servers. I found one of those too, but want to try the 'for free' one first (though it's only $30 a year and won't break the bank *weak laugh*). Other news is that I am going to join about ten webrings in the next week or so. Please check the WebRings page and post any ideas in the forum. Thanks!
BratGirl
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Copyright Info...
All written works on this site and in our forum are the sole and complete property of the authors who wrote them. Under no circumstances may any of the works here be copied or used in any way without the written consent of said author(s).
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