ipb

The forum's first ever RPG is now running down in Bpalvilleshireford Parish. If you're interested in learning more and playing, please go peak into The Great Hall! Registration ends at 5PM on Monday, Mar 17, 2008!

After an overwhelming response -- filling up all 75 slots in just under 15 hours -- registration is closed. Those of you not playing: I hope you enjoy reading, and if you weren't able to register before it closed, if this is fun for all, we'll probably have another round

Bumping to remind you how to change the time settings

Just wanted to mention that since Daylight Savings Time varies by country, with the new law not being programmed into the forum software, those in the US will need to manually adjust their daylight savings setting in the board. To manually adjust daylight savings settings: First, you will need to go to the Board Settings option of My Controls. It's under the "Options" menu (or, use the direct link provided). It'll look something like this: Under "Your base time zone", select your actual time zone. Under the "DST Correction" box, check the box next to "Is daylight savings in effect?". If you have checked the "Auto Correct DST" option, you will need to uncheck it to manually override. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the "Change my Account Options" button. And you're done!

Bumping this, because we have had several instances lately where people have been making topics for fundraisers without seeking approval.

Fundraisers are great things, they really are. I love how warm and caring this forum is. But, I fear that it may make us vunerable to predators and people who twist or stretch the truth for a few extra bucks - especially when the recipient isn't (for instance) a charity but a "friend of a friend of a friend" of a forumite. As a result, we do request that before starting a fundraising thread or post, you get in contact with us first to get permission. And when I say request, I mean "moderators are allowed to make any fundraising thread or post not previously approved disappear" - so it's not so much a request as a requirement. Even if it's an absolute emergency, there is usually someplace that can be turned to in the interim (legal aid, advocates, shelters, the Salvation Army, food banks, churches, etc. will usually help try to get someone out of a bad situation with legal advice, support, shelter, clothing, food, medical attention, and so forth). I hate to do this, but better to be a little cautious than to have our warmhearted members get jaded by a variety of scams, yes?

l6l: Please contact customer service (answers@blackphoenixalchemylab.com) for an answer to your inquiry. We are not the Lab and cannot answer your question, and the Lab has requested several times that they are not contacted here regarding CS issues.

For clarification: Having links to off-forum, non-eBay, non-BPAL swaps and sales (e.g., swapping clothing or other perfume) is ok. Having links to eBay sales is ok. Having links to off-forum, non-eBay BPAL swaps and sales is not ok. Basically, we have been finding people linking to sales on LJ and other off-forum venues where they are breaking the price caps. Rather than say "only those links that aren't violating our price caps can be linked to", we're saying nobody off forum can be linked to. Also: this goes for topics in the swaps forums. Topics linking to LJ and other off-forum swaps and sales will be made invisible and archived.

We've enabled the modification to regulate the images. (The modification that regulated signature images has not been ported to v2.1 of the forum code.) Currently, the settings are as follows Maximum width: 480px (which should be no surprise as that's our maximum width for forum images!) Maximum height: 100px. Maximum size: 20kb. Maximum number of images: 8 If you currently have images in your signature, please right-click on each image to make sure that they meet the height, width, and size requirements. If they do not, Edit Signature (in the User Control Panel and remove the images if you cannot resize them. If you have images in your signature that do not comply with our regulations, it will tell you which of the settings that have been broken. It will not, however, tell you which image is the problem, but it should be fairly obvious. If it comes to our attention that your current signature violates the policy, we will let you know that you have to comply. If you do not remove the image in question (or fix it so that it does comply), we may edit your signature.

Bumping to remind that linking to off-forum LJ sales is not allowed. If you want to sell or swap on the forum, use the Swaps forums. If you want to sell or swap on LJ, use LJ. Linking to your LJ to get around forum caps is not allowed, and we've had several people doing this lately.

The software doesn't do placeholders for merged topics. There have been a few times I've done it manually*, but it's a big pain in the ass. *And when I say manually, I mean literally writing about a dozen SQL statements in the database by the time everything's said and done.

Hi guys - I just wanted to let you know that our hosts decided to upgrade us sooner than we'd asked for two of the updates we had planned on doing Friday (upgrading our PHP and MySQL software), BUT that as a result of that upgrade, we have lost the ability to browse the feedback by letter. Unfortunately, the part that is sucking is in the encrypted portion of the code base, so I can't fix it. (And to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure that I could even if I wanted to - I haven't done anything with exception handling with PHP, and it's an exception handling problem.) The only way that it can be fixed is by upgrading the code base, which I haven't been able to start to do as we hadn't had the necessary server stuff. (What a catch-22! Can't upgrade it without PHP5, but PHP5 completely breaks the old software.) So, that's been removed until I have time to go obtain the new code base and convert everything to be as pretty as we like it. You'll have to search by handle or use the links provided within the forum to find someone's feedback. ETA: For a time scale, the last time we did this, it took me about 4 months to get everything the way we have it. It shouldn't take as long, because I'm much more familiar with IPB and with Censura than I had been then, but it will still take a pretty chunky amount of time to finish it.

We're going to be doing a bunch of updates in the next two weeks. The last I heard, the forum's going to be down on SATURDAY, Sept 15, for a period of 12-36 hours (depending on how long it takes us to verify and debug). Most of the updates are pretty boring and won't effect you overly much, but there's one big one: we're implementing a brand new the search engine for the forum. It's faster, allows us to let you search for one or two character things (though we've forced it to require at least two characters), better results, and in the coming weeks, should be querying the topic descriptions along with the titles. Also, right now, it's just set up for the forum itself, but it's got the capability to be integrated with the upcoming wiki and our blogs as well, which is pretty cool.

Hi! I just wanted to remind y'all that exceeding the price caps when offering to swap or sell is not allowed. If someone does exceed the price caps, please let one of the swap moderators know by forwarding the PM. (Since we don't have a forward button, just hit reply and instead of the sender's name in "To", put one of their names - allidavie, clephan, cupid430, grrrlennyl, Scylla, twistygirl - or mine, and edit the "QUOTE" to be "QUOTE=sender" at the beginning of the post - leave the "/QUOTE" alone.) Thanks!

I've been futzing with settings tonight to try to see if I couldn't find a quick and dirty solution to a search engineering issue that popped up. For some reason, I thought it'd only take an hour, but it ended up taking 4. My bad.

On August 22, 2007, MissAnthropy created a new account (InanimatusConjurus) for the purposes of trolling in the Conjure Oils thread. She was subsequently put on a 1-month suspension. Within an hour of her suspension, she created a second new account (paintahappylittletree), presumably to continue monitoring the situation with Conjure Oils. At this point in time, she had an additional 6-months added to her suspension for attempting to circumvent her suspension. Within two hours, she created a third new account (SeeYouNextTuesday), using a transparent proxy and sent me the following message. At this point in time, she was banned.

There have been rumors floating about administrative action dealing with secondary accounts and banning. (I'm saying "secondary account" rather than "duplicate account" because we're now seeing forum members loan their accounts to other people - so the second account that's involved isn't necessarily "duplicate", but it's not an approved usage.) As we've touched upon before, we have a slew of tools that we use to track secondary account activity, using common internet technologies such as cookies, sessions, and IP addresses. Cookies are tiny text files that live on your computer. You can opt out of them, though it takes away some of our cooler features (such as always staying logged in or collapsing forums). Sessions are something that our server create whenever you login. If you use cookies, there's actually cookies about your session information, and if you don't, the session information gets added to the end of the URLs. Cookies & sessions are specific not only your computer, but to your browser profile and computer login. IP addesses are like mailing addresses for computers, letting servers know how to send data (such as web pages and images) back and forth between a client (you) and a server (the host). Sometimes, there are intermediates between the two (like routers, firewalls, or proxies) - especially with dial-up or large networks - which will give the appearance of multiple people sharing an address. Like everything else on the internet, these tools create logs. We review the logs both in batches and individually. We occasionally target individual accounts that have been suspended from swapping, reported as a swaplifter, or suspended (in general) for non-random screening -- to ensure that people who aren't supposed to be accessing the forum or particular areas of the forum aren't doing so by other means and to ensure that people who are ripping off forum members aren't doing it with multiple accounts (such as last year's love.is.suicide/simple.delight incident). We could probably do away with all of these tools by forcing users to use services like ConfirmID to prove that they are who they say they are, but that requires all users be over 18, doesn't work for all countries, may not work if you've not got ready access to your proof of identity papers, and costs money -- and that doesn't work for us. Let me repeat: at the end of the day, all of this is to make sure that people who aren't supposed to be accessing the forum/parts of the forum (banned users, suspended users, and users who are restricted from certain areas of the forum) cannot do so, and that people who are trying to rip off others can't do so with as many accounts as they care to create. Furthermore, things like occasionally logging in at a friend's house, or a coworker's computer, or a computer lab rarely trigger our asking questions, and being picked out as having unusual account traffic patterns doesn't usually result in any more than just a standard questionnaire. But I digress. We have been hearing rumors about how wichapi's account became banned, and since some of these rumors allege some shocking activities on our part, we are going to address this issue. Normally, it's not our practice to publicly disclose the specific reasons for banning someone, but with these allegations roaming around about the reasons for this banning, we've decided to what happened a matter of public record. On February 11th, May 17th, and June 23rd (all in 2007), wichapi violated our price caps. Our policy on price caps states that on the third offense, users' accounts are barred from swapping for two months; on a fourth offence, they are permanently barred from swapping. I'm not going to discuss the merits of barring frequent price cap violators in this post -- that's its own discussion. Obviously, any swaps that were already in progress at the time of her banning could continue to their rightful conclusion -- but until late August, she could not start new swaps here at the forum. (Obviously, there was nothing stopping her from swapping on LJ or NALF or other locations.) Swaps were initiated on or around June 30, July 9th, July 10th by wichapi - despite having her access to the swaps forum taken away on June 23rd. Our logs showed that during this period of time, wichapi was using the account of a coworker ("Black Medicine") to access the forum from her computer. Literally: someone(s) was logging out of wichapi's account, logging into the "Black Medicine" account, look at topics in the swap forums, log out of the "Black Medicine" account, log into the wichapi account, and go about her business (including arranging swaps, as evidenced by shipping notifications and timestamps on the swap posts she had been responding to). Whether they were doing it together or it was just wichapi is irrelevant - both types of actions intentionally subvert wichapi's ban on swapping on this forum. On July 13th, the "Black Medicine" account was banned for abusing one of our members, abusing one of our moderators, and a long-established refusal to follow our guidelines. As is standard when we ban someone, we banned not only the account, but email addresses and IP addresses associated with it. On July 14th, wichapi contacted us because she was unable to access the forum. This initiated the duplicate account analyzer while we were waiting to hear back about what IP address(es) she was attempting to access the forum from. On July 15th, the account "ShyinChi" was created from wichapi's computer at home. Unlike most new users, this account accessed the New Members Validation Center (required by all users), scanned topics in the Introductions forum (which is where you go after you verify that you've read our rules), and visited several topics in the various swaps forums. Even when they don't read topics or participate, almost all of our new users visit other forums as well. On July 16th, it was established that while wichapi's computer was behind a network both at home and work, to the best of her knowledge, she is the only person that uses her computers. (Incidentally, this does imply that she had obtained the password for "Black Medicine".) On July 18th, wichapi mentioned that "Black Medicine" had accessed the forum from work - something we had already known. Nothing was said regarding home access, or about the "ShyinChi" account. On July 22nd, wichapi's account was suspended from the forum as a whole for 6 months, and at the conclusion of her suspension, it would be suspended from the swaps section for an additional 3 month. This suspension was entirely due to the fact that two secondary accounts (one legitimate account, "Black Medicine", and one duplicate account, "ShyinChi") were used to access the swaps forum from wichapi's computers at home AND work while wichapi was banned from swapping. In her suspension notification, she was informed that any additional duplicate account activity would result in her account being banned from the forum. On July 23rd, the account "MaineEvent" was created from wichapi's computer at work. On July 24th, wichapi's account was banned from the forum, with the caveat that if we saw account activity from the two accounts that wichapi claims she did not create that demonstrated that they were in fact separate accounts (that is: not using her computer or network accounts), we would reverse the ban and continue on with the suspension. On July 29th, wichapi provided the names of the individuals she claims created those accounts (two visiting artists), and complained that it wasn't fair that we were pegging her reinstatement on them. Additionally, she accused us of illegally penetrating her firewall in order to determine what happened on individual computers. On July 31st, we notified her that her account was permanently banned. To summarize: wichapi was initially barred from swapping for two months because she violated the price caps three times. It wasn't permanent, and it only applied to the swaps forum. Everything after that stemmed from her attempts to circumvent that barring, first by using other people's accounts, and then creating multiple accounts. After more than a dozen e-mails exchanged between she and we, during which she blamed co-workers at work and guests -- despite the fact that the log-in patterns clearly demonstrated that some of these other accounts were primarily logging on to spot potential swap partners, then logging back off so wichapi could contact them. At the end of the day, she was persistently attempting to circumvent the rules, and when we presented her with the evidence of that, she went so far as to accuse us of hacking her computers in obtaining that evidence. (For the record: we didn't.) As a result, we decided that she was not going to abide by our rules and had no wish to: we banned her.

The only oil so far that's had the aldehydes is the unreleased "Toxin" prototype, too.

Unfortunately, the tech guys were unable to get the binary logs to restore today's mishap. Sorry guys - what you've got is all we've got to bring back

I just wanted everyone to know that I just accidentally erased all of the PMs when I was trying to delete a bunch of spam from the member "spd". My apologies. I'll be able to restore the PMs through our last backup (Jul 24 04:04 EST), but anything sent past that time may not be recoverable. I'm going to talk with our tech support about seeing if they can recover them from our binary logs, so cross your fingers. But, to be on the safe side, if you PM'd someone about something recently, you may want to re-PM them

PMs through our backup have been restored and I'm about to contact tech support about getting the ones from today from the binary logs.

Just a reminder that we still require administrative approval for fundraiser requests - even for charities. Topics created for fundraising efforts that are not approved by SV or I will be made invisible and archived.

This has recently popped up as an issue, and so I wanted to remind y'all that blocking a moderator from PMing you about moderating issues (duplicate topics, swapping outside the swaps area, etc) and can result in a warning and/or a suspension from the forum.

We have noticed that there are quite a few swaplift reports in the swap feedback system that aren't reported to our swap moderators. We have requested several times that if you leave swap feedback that indicates that you have been swaplifted that you also contact the swap moderators to let them know, so they can log the swaplift and, if necessary, inform me so I can ban the user from our swap forum. Our swap moderators are not in charge of the feedback system, just in administrating the forum, so they often are not aware that this is an issue. Effective immediately, we will be issuing reminders (and, if necessary, warnings) to individuals who report swaplifts in feedback and NOT to the swap moderators. Additionally, we have decided to notify users that they have had a swaplift report against them via the warning/reminder system. We are going through our old swaplift reports to add reminders, though it may be a slow process (I know that I've only done about a quarter of the individuals I'm supposed to cover). If you get a swaplift report, and it has been resolved or you don't know what they're talking about, please let one of the swap moderators know so we can verify and update the status of your report. Also, if you get a swaplift report and attempt to contact the person who has reported you and they do not respond, let the swap moderators know -- we will try to contact them off the forum for you.

If you think you've been swaplifted, and it's been one month or more, you should do two things: 1) Let the swap moderators (cupide430, grrrlennyl, Scylla, Silvertree, twistygirl) know. They have a list tracking reports of swaplifting. Letting the swap moderators know that you have been swaplifted is the only way that they will be added to the master list of reported swaplifts. Even if you leave feedback saying you have been swaplifted, unless you PM the swap moderators, it will not count against them. As a result of people not doing this, there's at least one individual that has reached the three outstanding swap limit that hasn't had their ability to swap taken away because none of the people that left feedback stating they'd been swaplifted have reported it. Please carbon copy the individual in the PM so they know that you have reported their outstanding swap. 2) Leave that person feedback. Be sure to include details in the comments section, such as "We finalized a swap on 10/19 for two catalog bottles. I sent my end on 10/21, and delivery confirmation says it got there on 10/26. I have PM'd them several times to make sure they've sent their side and gotten my bottles, but I haven't heard from them AND according to the message tracker, they haven't even read the message even though they've been to the forum several times since I sent my last message!". Leaving feedback will not only remind the individual again to send their items, but will let the community know that the individual has a long-outstanding swap. If your reported swaplift gets resolved, you need to let the swap moderators know so we can update that individual's record and if you left feedback, you need to edit it to update it.