Administrator and Moderator Appreciation Thread (2025 Edition)

[ZLoth]

Just a big thank you to @Alex and all of the moderators who help maintain the AAForums website, wiki, and forums.

 

[kphoger]

Gift cards can be mailed to the following addre.........

[kurumi]

Better than Usenet (moderated)

Better than Discord (research and insights are searchable, and don't disappear)

Thanks for all your hard work that results in a resource we sometimes take for granted

[Alex]

Thanks all, I greatly appreciate it! And this morning I believe I was able complete the needed steps to bring the AARoads Wiki back online. So I apologize for how long that was down, as I was initially unsure how to address the DNS settings for it since it is hosted on a separate VPS than the main server here.

I am close to rolling out the first in a revamp of the main site programming using object-oriented programming. This will eventually eliminate the procedural PHP that drives the guide pages and also both sets of Wordpress-based pages. There should be an overall improvement to the site's responsiveness once I implement OOP. The current system with the guide script iterates through the entire photos database table everytime a page loads. That's 220,000 or so records. You can imagine the drag it places on the rest of the server, including the forum here...

I also removed the awful NextGen Gallery plugin from Wordpress, which was the culprit for attracting all of those Hong Kong, IP addresses flooding the server. So there are several pages that are essentially broken or partially broken that I must address. The flipside is that I went ahead and debuted the first revamp of the site to replace the NextGen code that covered the Archives section of the site (which I had named Albums because of a conflict at the time). You can see the responsiveness of the pages for yourself at the new Archives section.

I am relegated to the ugly URL's of photos.php?road=i-022-al or pages.php?state=ca for the Archives section (and the guides sections eventually) until I can remove Wordpress. That is due to the .htaccess rules set by Wordpress which enact redirects to URL's sitewide regardless of it being outside of Wordpress.

The Shield Gallery is currently offline, as the depreciated PHP finally caught up to me. I'll be working on recoding that next. That should be relatively easy as compared to the main guide and state pages. This will allow me to add code to enable updating it again outside of directly through the database via phpmyadmin. I stopped posting updates or taking submissions to the gallery once that became the lone method to add entries.

[LilianaUwU]

Welp.

[Alex]

I discovered that all of the AARoads email accounts are not receiving or sending email. So if you were wondering why you were not getting any notifications from the Forum, that would be why.

I have to configure the DNS settings and make some changes with the VPS servers. I'm working on correcting this now...

[CtrlAltDel]

Thanks all, I greatly appreciate it! And this morning I believe I was able complete the needed steps to bring the AARoads Wiki back online. So I apologize for how long that was down, as I was initially unsure how to address the DNS settings for it since it is hosted on a separate VPS than the main server here.

I am close to rolling out the first in a revamp of the main site programming using object-oriented programming. This will eventually eliminate the procedural PHP that drives the guide pages and also both sets of Wordpress-based pages. There should be an overall improvement to the site's responsiveness once I implement OOP. The current system with the guide script iterates through the entire photos database table everytime a page loads. That's 220,000 or so records. You can imagine the drag it places on the rest of the server, including the forum here...

I also removed the awful NextGen Gallery plugin from Wordpress, which was the culprit for attracting all of those Hong Kong, IP addresses flooding the server. So there are several pages that are essentially broken or partially broken that I must address. The flipside is that I went ahead and debuted the first revamp of the site to replace the NextGen code that covered the Archives section of the site (which I had named Albums because of a conflict at the time). You can see the responsiveness of the pages for yourself at the new Archives section.

I am relegated to the ugly URL's of photos.php?road=i-022-al or pages.php?state=ca for the Archives section (and the guides sections eventually) until I can remove Wordpress. That is due to the .htaccess rules set by Wordpress which enact redirects to URL's sitewide regardless of it being outside of Wordpress.

The Shield Gallery is currently offline, as the depreciated PHP finally caught up to me. I'll be working on recoding that next. That should be relatively easy as compared to the main guide and state pages. This will allow me to add code to enable updating it again outside of directly through the database via phpmyadmin. I stopped posting updates or taking submissions to the gallery once that became the lone method to add entries.

There's a lot I don't understand here, but I'm glad you do!

[Alex]

I contacted support again this morning and have the corrected MX DNS records for the email settings now set. The DNS settings should propagate within the next 24 hours. This will at least restore any Forum notifications options that you may have set from that end. Whether there are still issues on this end is based upon SMF...

There's a lot I don't understand here, but I'm glad you do!

Heh, no worries. 

[Lyle]

Yes, thank you for all you do for this website. I really appreciate everything you do, and it must be really hard work.

By the way, there are still some guide pages and images that don't work.

[Alex]

Yes, thank you for all you do for this website. I really appreciate everything you do, and it must be really hard work.

By the way, there are still some guide pages and images that don't work.

Thank you for your kind words!

As I continue working on the back end of the site, I am realizing that the way things were set up or rendered sometimes adds needless complication to the script. Nonetheless I'm making some progress, as I just completed an overhaul of the Shield Gallery. I still have to create some scripts to allow me to edit or add entries, so work there is not done.

I decided to eliminate the NextGen Gallery Wordpress plugin from the install on the VPS server here. Since it was an entry point for that IP flood, I did not want to bring it back. I planned on removing it anyway, and already had replaced all of the Archive related galleries with the new Archives section I added this Winter. There still remains quite a few galleries that were utilized on the guide pages, and anywhere this was the case, raw shortcode displays instead such as:

Code Select Expand

[ngg_images source="galleries" container_ids="240" display_type="photocrati-nextgen_pro_horizontal_filmstrip" image_crop="0" image_pan="1" show_playback_controls="1" show_captions="1" caption_class="caption_above_stage" caption_height="80" aspect_ratio="1.5" width="100" width_unit="%" transition="fade" transition_speed="1" slideshow_speed="5" border_size="0" border_color="#ffffff" override_thumbnail_settings="1" thumbnail_width="120" thumbnail_height="90" thumbnail_crop="1" ngg_triggers_display="always" order_by="sortorder" order_direction="ASC" returns="included" maximum_entity_count="2000"]
Not sure if this might be what you encountered with missing images, but it is one thing that will take some time to address. Otherwise with having to manually upload the entire site onto the VPS server, I may have missed some files/images here and there.

Also I have corrected several pages where the file folder was incorrect, resulting in missing images. Feel free to let me know any pages with missing images so that I can investigate as to whether it was an isolated problem, or if it is a larger part of an omission or coding problem.