Experts Round Table Network

Due to a lack of funding, and more importantly, the lack of skilled volunteers to do the necessary maintenance for ERT, it looks like we will be closing our site by the end of May.

We could probably scrape up the $108.00 USD for the Host renewal, but with the email notifs down again, and the site under attack by spambots, there is not much sense in staying open under the present conditions.

There are still about 6 weeks left, and if enough people can pitch in to help, those of us still here are more than happy to keep the site up.
There is a small but steady traffic coming through, and that is all we ever expected, as we were trying something different.

I would like to say a big THANK YOU to all those that put in their time and energies into making this work as long as it did (too many to name, but you know who you are), and with a little luck, ERT will return one day when things are a little better.

Anyone that wants to find the Articles, Tutorials, and Forum questions, can find most of it at:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.expertsrt.net
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.expertsrt.com
http://web.archive.org/web/20071219224222/www.expertsrt.com/articles/index.shtml

if you don't get what you want saved before the site goes down.

Again, Thank You. It's been fun and a pleasure knowing you people, and I am glad I can still cross paths with most of you once in a while at other places.   : )

coral1
Governing Council Member

No Surrender!! No Retreat!!

I really don't know what else to do at this point.  Since Cd& is MIA along with Matt and Nick....

I really had high hopes for this site.  :-(

Yup, not much happening here anymore...

I'm pretty much cutting myself off from all of the internet at the moment to take care of real life things.  I just can't waste time on virtuality anymore.  But, like I said, this was a good idea and I'm really going to miss it and all of you that hung in there with us.  You guys really are awesome.  And don't stop helping the ones who really need it.  It will keep your minds fresh and young.

Good Luck on your 'Real Life' experiment.    ; )

Take care of yourself, and I will see you when I see you.   oxoxox

Thanks Craig.  You've always been a good friend.

To all that are listening,

This project began with a good heart but all the best efforts were spoiled by lack of organization and a cohesive idea.

At the beginning of this we spent hundreds of man-hours arguing about what the forum should look like, while many of us could have spent those same hours building it quietly.

There’s plenty of us “members” that could front the $100 to pay for the current host, or offer another hosting solution (I run 3 servers that could serve the purpose), but after the initial couple of months it was apparent to me that this effort was wasted from the beginning.

I hope a day comes when we can be reunited to put together what we originally envisioned, but I personally am done seeking consensus organizing an online community with loud people that clearly have no idea how to build such a thing (one particular name comes to mind).

I have appreciated all of you and I wish you the best. Please keep my email in case our paths gravitate together in the future. (site -at- netbulge -dot-. Com)


Best regards,

Esopo / Jose.

PS: Don’t grieve this place silently. This country - this world - needs to start pointing fingers or we’ll always be lamenting what other people destroyed because we let them. We could have had a good thing here. I know I chipped in as much as I could.

Hi, Wildman !

I'm glad to get a chance to say 'catch you around', to you.
I think about you every time I boot to UBCD, and it saves my butt again.    : D

Swing by the Lounge and say HI to the Lizards when you get a free minute.    : )

Hi all.  I share huntress's point of view.  I'm tired of virtuality.  Tired of computers all together.  I much prefer spending time with horses playing parelli games.

  : D    Then by all means, Go for it. Life is meant to be enjoyed.
If you ain't having fun, you ain't doing it right.     ; )

Thanks again for all the time and help you put in to ERT, and I am glad I got the chance to know you.

Later....

Sorry for not being around. School and work is just too high of a priority at this time. I wish I was able to put more time, but can't no matter how much I want. I truly agree that ERT had a great run, but maybe its time to move on.

The costs, manpower, and traffic can not compete with the thousands of other tech sites on the web. I tried doing some updates a few months back, but my admin password for ERT was no longer valid. I don't know if it was changed, the host messed something up or what. If anyone can still access the admin page for Cpanel please PM me. I would like to make a backup of the site's files.

Please post your contact info at http://www.expertsrt.net/main/forum/topic,1493 so we can call keep in touch if and when ERT is taken offline. It was great working with each and every one of you on this site and thank you so much for your time, support, and friendship. Farewell ERT.

Hmmmm.... I can't post there.  Keep finding fubars from the upgrades the Host did.

coral47 <at> gmail <dot> com is a now my primary email.
And THE Lounge is a good place to look for me. 
Stop back in and say HI.     ; )

Best Wishes on your schooling. 

Wow, i just realized i did not even write a proper post to this thread.  I read all the posts several times.  I share your feeling so much that I feel I could have written most of what's been said.

It's sad that ERT is dying, but I guess that's how it needs end.  I'm very happy to have met you here.  For me, ERT is a complete success.  I probably did not expect the same things from the site as some did.  I came here to discuss geeky topics with geeks from different horizons.  That's exactly what I found here.  I never liked the whole "experts" idea...  As a good geek, I never liked hierarchy.  I guess the initial idea was to help ignorant dummies.  The site ended up being some kind of discussion group, and that's exactly what I was looking for.

Thank you all for being who you are.  The site is dying because we moved on with our lives.  Some stopped participating gradually.  Some stopped because of school, some stopped to open a restaurant...  It's a nice death, a quiet and peaceful death.  If you love somebody, set them free.  I'm glad you have things that are more important to you than talking about computer problems.  Walk in the nature, ride your bicycle or your horse, play with a child or a dog.  That's what's important in life.

There is just one persone I'm worried about... it's Cd&.  The way he suddenly vanished... some important job he had to finish.  It's not like him to leave the domain name expire.  Cd&, wherever you are, thank you.  I appreciated your tender heart inside your "grumpy old man" manners.  I owe you all my knowledge in HTML/CSS... (directly or indirectly).

Ok, that's enough emotional talk.  Now, who has an idea for a thumb?  Is there a way we can save the articles and contact info using some tool that has a longer life expectancy than our own forum?  Yahoo group?  Google gizmo?  Facebook junk?  I'm a member on VGR's site http://www.europeanexperts.org/

When Huntress pops in, C_M needs his Powers turned back on so he can make a backup.
And most of the .COM and .NET stuff is saved in The WayBack Machine (links in my first post), anyway.

Anyone that can't get into C_Ms link, can post contact info here.

I still pop into European Experts once in a while. So I will probably see you there.
I am in and out of several sites, but mostly I haunt the Hardware TAs and The Lounge at Experts-Exchange.com

Later.    : )

Yo 8-(

I'm quite disappointed, not really surprised but a bit disappointed, by the final outcome of ERT. Too bad. I'm also still worried by the .com domain expiration that cut of the main site, and by the disappearance of Cd&. I'll miss you all. You will always find me willing to help "dummies" (as GS said ;-) on europeanexperts.org and I'll be contacted via edainworks.com.

I will try to get as much tuts & articles as I can and put them on my server(s).

Regards to all, au revoir les gens ;-)

data dumped. Couldn't get all Mentors profiles, some are not backed up.

TTYL

So you were able to login to CPanel? If so could you please PM me the login details so I can make a backup as well.

I'm afraid I never had access to Cpanel.  That was only Matt, Nick and VGR. 

My contact info:
HellOnWheelz <<(at)>> gmail [dot] com
theonlyhuntress <<@t>> gmail [[d0t]] com

Those are the two I will keep forever.

no, I recovered all the stuff via HTTP.

I tried the credentials I had from Matt and they don't work anymore on the https://box526.bluehost.com:2083/ URL I end up on when trying expertsrt.net/securecontrolpanel

sorry...

Matts contact info is here:

http://www.nicholassolutions.com/contact.html

I'll dig around and try to find my login for SSH, maybe it still works and I can archive the the web directory. The CPanel login stopped working when bluehost did some upgrades, hopefully it didnt mess up the SSH too.

Well, I think we all saw tht it screwed up the email notifications at the very least.

the credentials for ssh are the same as for CPanel. I don't have the SSH configuration anymore, but I've the login & password ;-))

interested ? drop me a note

Matt, had me make a seperate SSH login with my own username and password. A handful of us had such accounts, which was used to run admin tasks and was setup to log every action done.

I had access back when we were still using phpbb but didn't get access when we switched over to SMF and joomla.

Howdy folks,
It's too bad it's come to this, but I'm happy that this site didn't reach it's potential largely because we all had  bigger and better things to do in our real lives.  I had high hopes for this place, even after I had to leave to focus on school, but to pull off a project like this realistically took resources that we just never really had. At least we gave it a shot, and we should be proud of our many small successes. It was a privilege knowing each of you, and hope our paths cross sometime down the road.

Some logistics: at present, even I do not know the user/pass, but I can get them and give them to admins. Please email me if you need them. Meanwhile, I have space on another server with almost identical configuration. I may be able to easily transport the site there for $10/year in domain fees that I am happy to pay. If that is the case, I will do so, and people can continue to poke around here and at least be able to look up old content. I may have to chuck some parts if it's too difficult to move, and I will probably try to lock things down a little better to prevent spam. I can't make any promises about if or when this will happen, but if it does, it will be relatively soon.

Take care,
Matt

That's a nice offer, and I won't tell you not to do it. I can still cruise through it to kind of keep an eye on things. My maintenance/tweaking skills still need serious work though.

I wouldn't mind trying to still get some of the .COM stuff into the Wiki on the .NET side, although that's a 'learn as I go' project (ie: really slow).

But as just an archive to poke through, the Way Back Machine already has most of it, so it might not be worth the space to dupe it.

I still check in daily, so leave a post on what you decide.   : )

ship has not sunk yet.  :)
cheers to all.

et les rats n'ont pas quitté le navire non plus 8-)

>> ship has not sunk yet.

Not yet. But I keep expecting a 404 (or some strange site) every time I log in.  : )

testing...

OK, the move is done -- if you're reading this, you're seeing the site on the new server.

As far as I can tell, everything is working.  I even got the email notifs back :) We may have lost a few posts made during the last couple days, but that's it. I can't promise how well or how long things will continue to work, but I'm willing to keep the site here indefinitely as long as there are no serious performance issues for my other tasks on this server. The only real conflict I can see coming up is email overload -- if that happens, I will have to turn notifs back off....but I expect if we're getting that much traffic, it will be time to move the site to its own server anyhow.

Coral is going to be taking on most of the day-to-day admin duties around here. He'll probably be cleaning up the forum a little and making some other changes here and there as he sees fit. If anyone is still around and wants to help, drop coral or me a line, and we'll set you up with the privileges you need.

My goal is to clean up a little, and try to get some of the ert.com content back up here eventually. At the very least, we'll all have an old hangout to come back to now and then.  :)


Matt

WOW. I got notifs !!   8 ))

And new buttons to play with.   : D

Thanks.

Holy crap!  I just got a s***load of notifs in my inbox!  w00t!  Nice job Matt!

Heya Sandi :)
Yeah, we've got a lot of email! I guess all the other admins got bombarded, too (Sorry guys).

I set it up signups require approval, but it looks like we've got a lot of bots filling out the form...I think maybe it'd be better to shut off signups again, or have people email some other address that admins check periodically. Or coral can just do everything =p

Matt

PS: I know you're taking a break from the internet, and I don't want to interfere with that...but all your admin settings are the same as on the old server, so feel free to keep doing as much (or as little) as you'd like.

OK, it let me in.
How do I check for bots?

Now that the notifs are working again I'll do my job to the best of my ability.  :-)  Thanks Matt.

I had closed the registrations because of all the Russian signup bots we're getting.  The SPAM was getting really bad and annoying as all hell.  lol

There's no easy way except to let them in, and see if they post SPAM. The danger is that they will wait for a while and then hit you later.  I will open a new thread so we can discuss some options. Given that we all have limited time, it's got to be something that doesn't require too much effort on our part. I'd rather we all spend time doing things like getting old (and new) content up, rather than chasing spammers around.

Yeah, given how many bogus signups we've had in the last hour or so, I don't blame you ;)

New thread on spam:
http://www.expertsrt.net/main/forum/topic,1502.0/

Hey guys, sorry I haven't been on here in... years.  I'm glad to see that you're not going down.  Now that life has settled down a bit, I'll try to contribute as much as I can.  I look forward to the next few weeks/months as to what kind of changes are being made around here.

Thanks for keeping the dream alive.

Tyler

Well welcome back Tidder!  I'm really hoping we can make a go of it now.