Anything other than snap server chat going on here?

[bobkoure]

Just wondering...(?)

[MadHacker]

do you feel like the number of posts have slowed down in water cooling and other cooling stuff compared to last year?

[bobkoure]

I have noticed fewer but deeper threads. Unsure about the total post count. Even with the same post volume, the fewer topics could easily make it feel like less is going on...

[jaydee]

I think the Snap Server chat has pretty much made the network forum.

As for the rest of the site there is a lot going on behind the scenes right now. I think things are going to pick up considerably over this year if everyone's plans actually pan out. I got a lot of stuff on the plate for water block design and construction forum once I get the die simulator setup properly. I got hundreds of tests to do on various things from base plate thickness to pins vs channels ect... pH is working on a 939 socket test setup and I am working on building him a die sim aswell. That should keep him pretty busy. I am not sure what else is going on with the staff members other than pH though. Maybe Joe can add some stuff now that his MidWest Lan deal had come to a near halt. Brian? He has had a lot of personal issues to deal with. I am suprised he posts at all anymore.

I don't think I am the only non staff member working on things either. Hopefull some others will get their projects going and post stuff.

[pHaestus]

It feels like there is less going on because there IS. At least officially. We get a lot more posters and lurkers-who-come out to play when I am posting articles and reviews and driving traffic this way. And when I don't the whole site slows back down to the current level. On a positive note it never seems to really DIE and it doesn't cost much to run so we seem to be ok with these periodic holding patterns caused by real life.

I really need another 2-3 people actively writing articles as staffers but the readers demand such a high level for the content (and rightfully so) that it is hard to find someone who can regularly put together solid content but that doesn't run their own site already. The way I see it, having a staffer who is regularly doing projects, building wcing parts, machining/milling/etc, someone else interested in quiet/silent cooling, someone to do the testing (currently pH), and someone who is an expert in electronics (currently Brian) makes a pretty robust staff. As it is, we have the expertise now in you guys but it's spread out in the forum threads rather than concentrated into articles.

Is that even a bad thing? Everyone wants to see the site grow, but really it doesn't need to grow much in terms of revenues atm. It'd be nice to see the procooling name everywhere again but my ego isn't so large...

I haven't been using the Pro/Geeks concept as effectively as I should because it's such a pita to format and post reviews in Net Objects Fusion. One day we will rebuild the site in PHP/SQL and make it easy to edit/update/manage. That day is not today.

One thing I COULD do is give some of the regular forums contributors subdomains and a pro/staff subforum. It seems like (off top of my head): BobKoure, JayDee, and incoherent are pretty regularly posting something that is of interest to all our readers and regular forum posters.

[jaydee]

I would like to see more articles with a forum thread for discussion. The problem with the stuff spread around the forums is it gets lost easy. A lot of good threads are not article material either untill the thread matures though.

Anyway I go a lot of stuff in mind for DIY block stuff. I think having a decent test bench to test the final product will make people more interested so they have an idea of the performance they can get by doing the block themselfs. I should have a lot of time on my road trips to actually work on the writing part.

[bobkoure]

And I'd like to get back to some sort of wikipedia (or work-alike). I'm wondering if there's a way to link wiki entries to forum threads - so first just some bare boiler-plate, then maybe a forum discussion, which might end up feeding back into the wiki entry. I guess there'd need to be a way of closing off threads to new comment, adding a new thread and making sure both were in the "history" section, otherwise, when looking at the thread for a particular entry you'd need to wade through the whole thread, including now-obsolete comments about an old version. The last post in the closed thread might contain links to the continuation, now post-this-revision, and maybe back to the wiki entry. I've done some work on CSCW (computer supported collaborative work) in the past, so this is a familiar area for me.
Speaking of which, the links in the "links" system seems to be down.

And... the reason I asked the "snap servers only?" question was because I've been seeing some unusual slowdowns / unavailability with DNS servers on the net around the New England / New York area and intermittent very-long delays on internal networks attached to them - and have a completely unjustifiable suspicion that they're under some kind of attack.

A "conspiracy theory" is that they'd be a perfect target for phishers - even someone somewhat network sophisticated (like, well... me) would be fooled by a website that actually had an address of [/i]hpps://paypal.com[/i] - but what if that paypal.com actually, when looked up in DNS returned the IP of some sleaze-ball phisher?
I'm not a DNS expert, but from my long-ago reading of the RFC (time to re-read) it's not designed for security - and even if it was, a big bot-net might be able to mount an effective DOS on the several "authoritative" name servers, for, say, paypal.com, they then might be able to effectively "poison" the other name servers with their bogus IP(s).

So... having only guesses, I thought I'd discuss it with a group of very smart technical folks I already knew - and who I was pretty sure (based on past experience) wouldn't be shy about telling me I was wrong...