Server issues

Hey peoples...we’ve been having mail server issues for a *long* time now...turns out it was Lee’s fault!  :) Someone was sending him *thousands* of spam emails a day.  Multiple thousands, with attachments.  For some reason trying to forward his Moorewatch address to his real one was creating massive mail queues that would eventually clog the server and eat all the CPU, forcing me to reboot and clear the queue as fast as I possibly could.  I deleted his Moorewatch mail account and the server just dumped 4500 messages on my account alone.

If you just got a shit-ton of emails from one of our sites...sorry!  It looks like the problem is, for the moment, solved.

Virtual Brewski

Today is SysAdmin Day.  Take a moment to say thanks to the tireless JimK, who somehow manages to keep Right-Thinking, Right Thoughts, MOOREWATCH, and a few other sites up and running day in and day out.

If it wasn’t for Jim, you’d be stuck reading Power Line.

Site changes *UPDATED*

The HTML formatting buttons work again!  Thanks to Derek at Ellislab (the creators of ExpressionEngine, which powers the site) for finding the problem over the weekend.

As you may have noticed, some things have changed around here.  A slightly tweaked layout, I hope it makes things more readable.  The comments page has changed...I upgraded the back-end software and it broke the HTML button formatting.  Until I figure out why, or find a replacement plugin, I’ve changed it so that you MUST preview a comment before posting it.  I think this will not only help you figure out if you forgot to close a tag, but it will also force people to slow down and read what they wrote before hitting submit.

Also - big change here - you may edit your comments for up to three minutes after you’ve posted them.

Tomorrow I upgrade the forums.  And try to find out why the formatting buttons are so evil all of a sudden.

It’s Baa-aack…sort of

Update

IT’S WORKING!  Forums and all.  Many thanks to Rick Ellis from pMachine for talking me through it.

What a couple of days, and I’ve only gotten ONE site up and running, and this needs more work.

Well, if you haven’t heard yet, or noticed that the site looks strangely out of date, we lost ALL our data again.  Every bit and byte.  hard drive failure.

My only backup was from April.

That will NEVER happen again.

If you are an author here at Moorewatch and you want to re-post any article you’ve written since April 10th of this year, please feel free.  You might be able to reconstruct it from Google cache.

In fact, it would be helpful if people re-constructed old articles and send them to me...jimk.moorewatch at gmail dot com.  Let me know which ones you find and are willing to do and I’ll try to make sure no one does the same one.

Forums are screwed up still, but I need professional help on that one, so bear with me.

One last thing: If you registered an account in the last 4 months, you’re gonna have to do it again.  All were lost.

New ads flickering?

If you are seeing a weird flicker with the new ads...you’re using an older install of Firefox.  More here.

Tech note

Just a note to let comment posters know I upgraded the little buttons that let you post code like bold, italics, quotes etc.  The old way, if there was text in your paragraph already, the tags apepared at the end of the text no matter what.  Now you can highlight the text and click the approriate button and the code wraps itself around the text you highlighted.

This should help you folks who can’t seem to get the quote function to work.  Just copy & paste the text you want to quote, highlight it and hit the quote button.  Presto-chango, you get nicely formatted quoted text.

Comments are open mic.

New stuff

I just pulled off the upgrade to this site.  Hopefully a ton of little bugs will be fixed now.  Also...NEW FORUMS!  If you are a member of the main site and can post comments, you can post in the new forums.  One login, one registration.  One database to rule them all!

New forums: http://moorewatch.com/index.php/forums/

Get ready

Registration is open.

Site Problems

It seems the site’s been a bit iffy all day.  If you get the error, just reload until it goes away.  That series of errors you’re seeing is usually a sign of heavy traffic.  Not enough to be a DOS, it’s usually good traffic.  Has anyone seen a news story anywhere that mentions the site?  Any first-tier bloggers or Slashdot/Fark link us?  I can’t find any mass referring in the logs.

Of course, they could be coming to see my sparkling personality.  I’m so frigging lovable.  ;)

Anyway, just hit reload.  The site always comes up eventually.  ;)

WARNING TO ALL

Starting ten minutes from the timestamp on this entry, I will begin strictly and harshly enforcing the following rule:

Comments to any article MUST contain some relevance to the topic.  If the relevance is not obvious, you MUST explain how the comment is relevant.  Any violation of this rule will result in the immediate removal of your ability to post comments to this site.  Relevance must be obvious, explained in full, and all decisions will be the sole domain of the owners and contributors to this website.  You are here at invitation.  If you insist on dragging every discussion down into the same 4 arguments, your invitation will be revoked.

WE HAVE A FORUM FOR DISCUSSIONS.  There is a link to the forum in each and every post.  You can start your own topics there.  You can find topics that fit your need to rant about the same four things repeatedly.  We will NOT tolerate it any more on the main body of the site.

Update from JimK

I have created a new member category for people who decide to ignore this rule.  If you violate this rule, you will be allowed to read, but not comment.  You are welcome to try to talk your way back into full member, but the odds are against you.  And I never, ever respond positively to threats or tantrums, so if you want your comment privileges reinstated after losing them, you may want to remember that.

If you try to re-register and are discovered, you, your email aliases, your nicknames and your IP block will be banned from the site.  If the problem persists, I will disallow registration with Yahoo, Hotmail and any other free email service I can think of.  It’s easy and takes only a few seconds of my time.  It takes more time to talk about it than it does to actually do it.  If the problem still persists, I will stop allowing new members to register altogether until we clean out the problem.

My advice would be to make an effort to stay on topic.

We’re getting through

John* over at Right Wing News listed the top 125 political websites (not just blogs) and guess who came in at #74?  That’s right, us.  Now, I’m not sure we deserve to beat sites like the Creator of Worlds (who mixes humor and commentary to an expert frappe and deserves a lot more traffic!) or Chronwatch (the site that kind of made Lee and I go “Hey, what about a ‘Moorewatch?") or one of my absolute favorite blogs, Powerline, but it amused me greatly that we beat the BlogsforBush site, although I’m not entirely sure why I find it funny.  ;)

The rankings are pure traffic, based off the numbers at Alexa.

So people are seeing the things we say, folks.  No matter what the trolls say, we *are* making a difference.  I’ve always believed it, but some times that simple point gets lost in all the brouhaha of running a moderately popular blog or website.  Or I lose sight of it, which is probably a more accurate statement.

Changing the subject just a bit, Michelle Malkin talks here about how some people say the blogoshphere is dominated bya few major players.  Yeah, well guess what?  When I first started posting to my own blog, I was excited to get 5 unique readers a day.  Now I do 500 a day consistently.  Small, but good for me.  I don’t need the extra pressure of a hugely successful personal blog.  I know Lee was happy enough to call me the day he broke 50.  Now he does anywhere from 2500 to 5000 depending on current events.  Amazing growth in a short time.  When we started Moorewatch, Lee and I almost threw a party when we started to consistently break a hundred per day.  Now we’re on “the list.” Michelle is right: new blogs can and do break in all the time.  A year ago I never heard of half the blogs I read every day.  Two years ago I read maybe 5 or six of the over 150 blogs I have bookmarked.

So why did we make it?  Well, we’re not the only Moore debunking site out there.  But we are the only one on the list.  I don’t exactly know why we made it.  We’re awesome?  Our striking good looks?  Rumors about our big p///// uhh, server?  Whatever the reason, I am thankful to have a place to go to both impart my opinions and learn from others.  We have a good thing going here, and I think it’s safe for me to speak for Lee and Para when I say we will continue to try to make it better and more informative for as long as you’ll have us.

Update

* For some reason, my clouded brain confused Charles at LGF with John Hawkins at RWN.  My apologies!

I almost don’t want to ask

I’m afraid to jinx it.

Am I crazy, or are the Category links, about halfway down on the right, actually working now?  Did I actually solve this problem, or am I delusional?

In the spirit of understanding

In an effort to foster a better understanding of each other, I added a new piece of code to the site.  Since everyone who posts a comment must be registered, everyone has a member profile here ta the site.  I suggest we all make use of them.  Fill them out.  Add things about yourself.  What you like to do when you’re not arguing politics...your favorite films, who you plan to vote for, what you ate for lunch, I don’t care what it is.  Just use it.

Maybe if we know a little more about each other we can spend less time screaming and more time on things that matter.

You can find a list of all member profiles here.  You’ll find a link to edit your personal profile here.

Category problems

OK, I get it.  A lot of the category links don’t work.  Something about a lot of Lee’s entries cause problems in our database every now and again, and I can’t figure out why.  I deleted the Hate Mail category completely, made it over again and reset a small list of them the newly remade category.  They worked.  I then went through the database and set them all to the new category.  at some point when adding a list of Lee’s...it broke.  I don’t know which one did it.

I don’t even know if it’s a solvable issue.  I’ll keep on it, but please stop emailing me about it.

Just to let everyone know…

The outage today wasn’t malicious, just a bad DNS server cutting us off from the outside world.  A minor hiccup, all fixed now.  All hail the technical expertise of the E-Places staff, who responded immediately to a non-support e-mail to let me know what the deal was.

Attention ALL MOOREWATCH commenters

I’ve had it with the way things go around here.  From now on, if you hijack a thread to argue something that is not part of the topic of the main article to which you are commenting, you run the risk of being instantly and permanently banned.

Small talk and a one liner here and there are fine.  Hijacking every thread on this site to beat your same pet issues to death is not.  Adjust your behavior accordingly.

That having been said, the comments to *this* post are open to whatever topic you feel.  If you MUST kitchen-sink your comments, confine it to THIS THREAD ONLY.

And the winners are…

OK, Lee and I read each and every entry in the book giveaway thread. Twice.  Maybe three or nine times.  We about pissed ourselves laughing, hemmed and hawed, jawed and argued for our favorites, and managed to cull the list down.  Then we picked our absolute favorites from the shorter list.  And it was all completely arbitrary. :)

Here is the official list of winners, hand-picked for nothing other than our own opinions of what was funny.

LD brought the funny a lot, so we just picked one: “I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 and all I got was this lousy website.”

The Ugly American was the mistress of the non-sequitur *and* the funny, so we picked one: “Because you dumb, conniving, thieving, smug pricks will believe anything.”

baric feline’s entry was so funny I couldn’t read it out loud without laughing: “Oh, me?  I’m just waiting for him to destroy Tokyo…”

And Druid brings the Academy Award callback joke: “Now with 50% more fictition!”

And since I was holding out on an extra book, we decided to give one to our favorite lefty Moore-lover.  The winner of the Bonus Liberal Asshat Moore-On Book Award Award is WetSprocket with “MOOREWATCH.COM: Hot conspiracy-on-conspiracy action!”

A LOT of them will make the rotation.  I think we picked like 75 or 80 of them.  If you’re interested in the short list, I threw it in below.  In the meantime, if your name is on this list, you need to e-mail me with your name and address so I can send you your copy of ”Michael Moore Is A Big Fat Stupid White Man.”

And djhojo!  If you don’t claim your book soon, I’m going to give it to someone else!

Our new Blogad

If you look to the left, you’ll see a new Blogad for the Denzel Washington remake of The Manchurian Candidate.  I’m spotlighting it because I think it’s an important move by a movie studio to give legitimacy to Blogads, and therefore blogs in general.

I urge you to click on it.  We don’t get any extra money if you do.  They paid their fee and that’s that.  But by impressing Hollywood with the idea that blogs can spread the word about a project, we help validate ALL of our opinions and what we do here, whether you’re a Moore fan or a Moore foe.

Win a copy of Michael Moore Is A Big Fat Stupid White Man

See inside for details.

*Update: When this reaches 500 comments, I’m cutting it off.

Woah.  Monumental screwup on my part

So I was testing some code to finally put an end to the long strings of text/long URL problem that ExpressionEngine has...and I killed the comment box by forgetting a closing quotation mark.

And not one of you emailed me to tell me.  :)

Never code tired.  You would think I would have learned that after the great database crash, but noooo… :)