Madison Motorsports - Site Suggestions/Status

Website Management/Ownership - Step Up or It Goes Away on March 1

Mon, 16 Nov 2020 14:57:16 +0000

Hi friends.

This has been a long time coming, but it's time that I officially and truly move on from administering mmsports.org and this forum. I've got a lot on my plate otherwise, and have been the de facto owner of this little piece of the internet since I was a sophomore in college, which was nearly 13 years ago.

The past few years in particular have shown that there is exactly zero interest from students in picking up ownership of this site and forum. The most I can get out of anyone is reimbursement for web hosting and domain registration fees each year, which works out to about $150/year. But regardless, it's all still in my name and if I don't update content on pages, update software, update plugins, etc then most of it doesn't get done. Taylor has helped with a few things (SSL in particular) but 90% of this has fallen to me.

The web hosting and domain registration both renew on March 15, 2021. If we do not have a clear new owner identified by March 1, I plan on letting everything lapse and the website and forum will cease to exist at that time. "Clear new owner" means you will identify a web host and transfer the site and domain 100% out of my name and ownership. I have enjoyed donating my time and energy to keeping the lights on, but I need to focus efforts elsewhere as I'm spread quite thin.

Thanks.

Site Ownership

Mon, 02 Dec 2019 19:48:31 +0000

Hello everyone.

Are any of you interested in taking ownership of the hosting for this site? I believe Jake is trying to relinquish the responsibility. I chip in with some money to pay for it throughout the year, in addition to ad sense revenue.

Insecure / Unencrypted Logins

Tue, 23 Apr 2019 04:02:06 +0000

Did the cert expire? Has it always been this way and nobody noticed or cared? Is Firefox wrong and logins are actually SSL encrypted?
There are free options for ssl certs to fix it. Unencrypted plaintext password submissions are pretty terrible.
Hope nobody uses common passwords.

Pop ups on mobile. iOS.

Sat, 09 Feb 2019 23:02:50 +0000

Someone reported to me that visiting mmsports.org on mobile leads them to some pop ups from what seems to be a third party. Has anyone seen this? I can't reproduce.

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

Is there some integrated image hosting we could pay for?

Tue, 27 Mar 2018 23:47:18 +0000

Gone are the days of we-todd-did and photobucket, and I see folks using imgur but it seems like any decent free service's days are numbered. Is there some way we could post images directly to this forum to make it easier for all and more familiar to the current generation of students? If so what is it? What would it cost? And does it involve clouds?

link

Mon, 05 Mar 2018 15:25:14 +0000

I just noticed when you're in the forum section there doesn't seem to be a link to take you back to the root of the site.
The logo goes to http://forum.mmsports.org/index.php
And the Home link to http://forum.mmsports.org/portal.php

Came across this while looking for the spring car show thread and couldn't find it, so I thought it might be listed on the home page, still no info on the car show.....Jaccccccccccckson

Moving from phpBB to myBB

Fri, 14 Apr 2017 17:47:55 +0000

This has been an update that needs to happen for a loooong time and I'm finally ready (almost) to pull the trigger.

What?
The forum is going to be migrated from the existing, old-school installation of phpBB to the current iteration of myBB. myBB is forum software that looks and feels very similar to phpBB, but provides a more modern take on administration and moderation while allowing for some new user-facing features that we currently don't have.

Why?
I'm sick of hearing students bitch that they can't get access or that the MM forums don't support X thing that other forums do. It's a pain in the butt to add new features to phpBB, whereas myBB both gives you more to start with, and adopts a WordPress-esque "plugin" functionality that doesn't require a ton of coding work by comparison.

Why Not or ?
Because vBulletin costs a lot of money - $250 at minimum. Some other options I explored either didn't provide all of the features we currently have, looked even worse from an administration standpoint, or were "free" but charged a monthly subscription fee. myBB was the best option I could find for $Free.99 that was feature-rich and actively developed.

When?
I'm hoping to finalize the layout/CSS shortly. From there, I'll need to shut this existing forum down for about half a day while the database is backed up, migrated, and everything on myBB is finalized. I may do it next week after work, or one day next weekend.

Questions
Ask away. I wanted to get a solid base before I made this post, but things are by no means final, so ask questions and I'll do my best to answer quickly.

Update Home Page Picture

Thu, 06 Apr 2017 20:29:37 +0000

Update home page picture. Preferably something from the car show to keep things relevant.

Update WordPress + Twitter Widget on Wordpress site

Tue, 31 Jan 2017 04:36:39 +0000

First off, the Wordpress version we have running is almost 8 years old.

I'm not going to try to do it myself because

1) I don't want to mess it up
2) I believe it's so old that you won't be able to update automatically
3) I really don't want to mess it up

The newer wordpress version is easier to work with and would allow us to easily add a Twitter widget on the side below the Donate and Facebook widget. I update the twitter often and before every event, so I feel like it could be useful. It's hard to keep the wordpress blog as updated as it should be.

So the forum killed itself

Tue, 08 Nov 2016 02:33:52 +0000

I don't know why... lots of files missing and/or changed on the app server at 2:15 today. Restoring now with a recent backup. DB seems fine.

Tapatalk Sign-in Issue

Wed, 10 Aug 2016 18:15:51 +0000

Is anyone having problems with tapatalk? I now (started a few days ago randomly?) have to log in with my password every time I open tapatalk and click on the MM forum. I cleared cache, re entered my tapatalk login. Still being prompted to enter my password every time which is pretty annoying. Any other ideas?

Embedded images without file extensions

Fri, 24 Apr 2015 16:43:02 +0000

A lot of cloud image storage sites dont use a .jpg/.gif/.png when linking to images. Which doesnt work when trying to embed the pics in a post. Is there a way to fix this within phpBB ?

Madison Motorsports Gmail Account

Tue, 16 Dec 2014 02:13:43 +0000

If you have the current username and password for this account, please send me a PM. :thumbup:

WE'RE BACK!!!

Mon, 13 Oct 2014 16:28:57 +0000

I dunno why, but someone DDOS'd us last night and IX took us offline and sent us a sternly worded TOS email informing us that they took the site down until we could get our ship in order.

I poked around, unfairly blamed & executed my mashup thread with all those videos in it, thinking that youtube plugin was causing the issue. Then I find out that we got gangbanged with by approximately 33,482 POST requests at about 2:15 this morning from some IP in Spain. :dunno:

I blocked the IP responsible for all of those hits and now I'm skimming the log to make sure the other hits around that time are at least from US IPs.

At any rate, that's why we went down. We're back now.

MM Forums: Now with 50% More Youtube

Tue, 15 Jul 2014 16:39:12 +0000

Jake made me a Full Admin this morning, and while still drunk on my new-found power I added the code to support embedding Youtube videos. So here's whatcher gonna do:

Step 1:

Find a youtube video.

Step B:

Copy the video ID. The thingy in the circle for the technically abstinent among us.

Step Tres:

Click the little youtube button on the post page. Like this.

Yo Dawg I heard you like to post so we put a post of your post in your post.

Step Quattro:

Paste the Video ID you copied way back in step 2 between the little [youtube] tags.

Boom!

[youtube]l5I6xuhNgVg[/youtube]

Pretty simple shit, but I figured I would provide a little tutorial as I'm pretty sure it won't work if you try to use the full URL or the youtu.be shortened URL, it has to be just the VideoID.