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  #21  
Old 04-03-2010, 08:44 PM
Gary Tisdel Gary Tisdel is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tdoty View Post
The switch to the new server was made after Jack was notified that his services were no longer needed. As a web dude, I would say "out of my hands" once I turned over whatever info I had to the person firing me.

Tim D.
he was still being paid after the switch, his contract wasn`t up. he kept recieving money but doesn`t have a backup.

gary
  #22  
Old 04-03-2010, 08:47 PM
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Kerry Pinkerton Kerry Pinkerton is offline
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Gary, the backup was on the server when it was turned over. You don't have to believe it but obviously some of us do.
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  #23  
Old 04-03-2010, 08:50 PM
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Marty Comstock Marty Comstock is offline
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Gary, you are like a doggy with a bone, you wont be able to let it go

That was not meant in a bad way, please dont take it as such.

yes, that may be true, and I bet he would pro rate a refund if asked. Also, once access was granted, well, it is now in control of others do do as they wished. they wished to have such control, and the rest is, well, gone.

He never had physical possesion of the backup, it was all on the same server.

Marty
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  #24  
Old 04-03-2010, 09:21 PM
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jhnarial jhnarial is offline
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Charlie I PM'd you on deleting your thread. This is a metal shaping thread. It is intended for the metal shaping community to have a voice.

So it will be allowed.

Most of you know me and know that I am not to much for conflict. Truthfully I don't really care anymore, I devoted a lot of weekends in the shop making threads that I worked really hard on. It was something I was really proud of and now it is just footprints in the sand.

I know a little about what is going on but I am not going to post about it because it is just hear-say.

I am however good at reading between the lines, Metal Meet was running on a very old version of V bulletin and the photos were on a separate site. I believe that they did not upgrade because they feared there would be some data lost.

When Jack said he was done with Metal Meet, (then a few days later the site crashed) I put two and two together. I believe they asked to upgrade and Jack thought this would end up in disaster, then he quit and they upgraded... which ended up being a disaster of the worse kind!

Now the statement I just made is made up from what I believed has happened.

I could be totally off base, I'm not sure.

This is the only post I will put up in this thread, I am more interested in shaping some metal.

The only thing I ask is that we keep this a discussion and we keep it civil amongst friends.
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  #25  
Old 04-03-2010, 09:25 PM
Tuck Tuck is offline
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The MM BOD had a contract with Jack McGee. The MM BOD chose to terminate that contract early, and when officially instructed to turn over the passwords to a particular individual, he did so. At that instant in time, all existing data was out of his control, and he no longer had any responsibility to keep anything. Why should he, he'd been summarily fired. He was however entitled to payment in full on his contract. He was not the one who acted in bad faith.

Tuck
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  #26  
Old 04-03-2010, 09:29 PM
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Gleeser Gleeser is offline
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Thanks Tuck. I never saw your posts as inflammatory, only information that others either refused to post or were to scared to. I saw the actions of Strever to be pretty underhanded however. You said it earlier, "censorship is in place" It's disgusting.

Honestly, I only drop in on MM bout once a week. It's become a madhouse run almost exclusively by whack-jobs. I don't need to be involved in or surrounded by that garbage. Life's too short. 99% of the people I like post over here anyway and most of the ones I don't aren't allowed here.

In my opinion, this site is run the way it should be. "Be civil or GTFO" Simple concept really. However when you involve money and a BOD.... well look at how well that works. Most of the BOD members that have left are people that truly wanted to better the site and for various reasons were driven away from it either by members or slow/no action from the BOD. It's a futile effort to continue attempts at managing the site that way. Obviously, even if the BOD wanted certain things accomplished their opinion means little if Strever just takes whatever action he feels is right without consulting them first.

Myeh, I'm pretty well over it. I am capable of getting in contact with all my metalshaping friends even if the entire internet was destroyed tomorrow. That's really all I care about anyway. The websites are like a little metalshaping methadone clinic to me. Small hits to get me by till I can get back to someone's shop for a hardcore hit of some sweet sweet work.

By all means though, continue discussing it. The members deserve to hear the story one way or another. Obviously it won't get published over there. I appreciate you taking the time to do it Rick.
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  #27  
Old 04-03-2010, 10:04 PM
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Wow Kerry, didn't take them long to censor you did it? lol
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  #28  
Old 04-03-2010, 10:26 PM
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Kerry Pinkerton Kerry Pinkerton is offline
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No but it did take them longer than I thought it would. They removed my request to have my content and login removed right away but the rebuttal on the ownership issue lasted a couple hours. Here is the post they deleted.
__________________________________________________ ______________

Not so fast guys...

Quote:
Originally Posted by Randy Ferguson
...MetalMeet.com has always been a solely owned website/forum. Wray Schelin was the original owner of the metalmeet.com domain name. It then went through a couple other owners and I was given the opportunity two weeks ago to own it. This was not an easy decision on my part, but after a few days of struggling whether or not I was willing to take on the task, I decided the good outweighed the bad and have taken ownership of the domain names metalmeet.org and metalmeet.com. ...


I have to disagree on this. As Randy knows, I was one of the first board members and have clear memories and documentation on much of what was said and done in the early days. Randy and I don't like each other but I have documentation to back up what I'm writing.

Back in January of 2004, Wray Schelin, MetalMeet founder, asked me to draft the MetalMeet BOD Guidelines and Responsibilities. With several phone calls, he and I drew up some bullet points and I word smithed them and sent the document out for review by the then BOD. Included in that document are these words:

MetalMeet.com domain name is owned, paid for, and renewed by MM BOD

These were Wrays direct words from our conversation. Wray was quite happy with this draft and it was ultimately the foundation for what became the BOD Bylaws as written by Rick Tuck (FriarTuck) and adopted by the BOD. I'm not sure that these words made it through the final draft but I am 100% sure it was Wray's intent.

I also distinctly remember conversations with Wray regarding the web site domain name. At the time, we had a real difficulty getting the web site released by the first webmaster David Miller. When David finally got paid and lost his last reason to hold out, Wray told me that he had told David to put the domain name in Jack McGee's name because the webmaster was the agent of the BOD and it would remain consistent regardless of who was or was not on the BOD.

And in another post on 11-14-2004:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Wray Schelin
...Another thing, Metalmeet .com will never be sold, it will grow or it will whither, it will never be sold. The same cannot be said for privately owned sites. Members that donate free material to a privately owned site may one day find their material and donated help etc, now belongs to someone else...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wray Schelin

Wray
Wray's above post also speaks to the ownership of content and you can clearly read that his fear was that the author would not be able to control his own content.

Larry and Dick do not, and DID NOT OWN the domain name. They were agents of the BOD who misused their authority and illegally transferred control to someone else. This is wrong on many, many levels and I will not stand by quietly and let it happen. Shame on those involved.

Kerry Pinkerton
MetalMeet member #6
Member of the initial MetalMeet BOD
  #29  
Old 04-03-2010, 10:28 PM
Peter Miles Peter Miles is offline
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Backups may or may not have been occurring on a regular basis. I have no way of knowing that to any degree of certainty and I had talked with some of the folks involved.

However, there have obviously been problems that have occured over the years and there has been a lack of adequate oversight and review to ensure that they did not happen again.

Before the problems of this year, we had (I believe) two other attempts at major upgrades that didn't complete successfully and in which we lost either actual data or cataloging information to access the data (example: photos that still existed in directories but the database that organized and provided access to them was damaged or destroyed).

Problems happen during upgrades. However, experienced professionals make full backups before doing upgrades and they copy those backups off of the server on which the original data exists.

If an upgrade fails, you can then rollback to the previous software and the backed up data - even if the entire server has to be rebuilt.

We were unable to do this and it happened more than once.


To me, that indicates failures at multiple levels.
  • According to information that I've received, we weren't paying for a server hosting service that performed any backups of their servers. If that is true, it was a really dumb mistake. The web master shouldn't have allowed that and the BOD should have had enough oversight to recognize that such a service was not being provided.
  • According to the information on this thread, if our webmaster actually was creating backups, they were being stored on the same server (hopefully at least on different drives) as the actual website and its databases and directory structures. I haven't noticed any mention of storing multiple generations of backups. Again, these would normally be regarded as significant operational, redundancy, and disaster recovery flaws. Again, this indicates errors on the part of the webmaster and the BOD.
  • As I mentioned previously, before doing any major software change, A complete backup should always be made and it should always be made to or copied to some other environment. Since we have had multiple situations in which we were not able to recover from incomplete or buggy migrations, these were apparently not being performed.
  • I have never seen any mention made of any restore tests being performed to see whether any of the backups that have supposedly been being made could actually be used to successfully be used to do a complete restore of the MetalMeet environment. Again, failures at multiple levels.
Failures of the magnitude of the problems currently faced by MM are like crashes of modern airliners: there is seldom any single point of failure that causes the disaster, but rather an entire chain of failures and/or errors that lead to a smoking hole in the ground.

The apparent chain here includes the following possible errors and omissions on the part of the players:
  • The website hosting contract apparently did not include any server-level backups
  • The webmaster did not appear to be performing regular, frequent backups and storing them off-server and/or off-site (at least they never seemed available when needed)
  • If regular backups were being performed, it appears that only a single instance may have been kept as opposed to every daily or weekly backup for the last six months, for example.
  • Pre-upgrade full backups and copies to off-server were not being performed
  • The webmaster's mastery of the website software being used and/or utilization of other technical resources was not sufficient on multiple occasions to perform a complete software upgrade or migration with out some loss of existing data
  • Multiple times, the webmaster did not appear to learn enough from the disasters of a failed or partially failed upgrade to ensure that the next one would be successful
  • The webmaster did not appear to recognize the limitations of the combination of his skillset, the operational environment, the software being used, etc. and ask the BOD for additional resources to ensure that a successful upgrade would be likely to be performed.
  • The BOD never appeared to learn enough from the failures of the past to ensure that appropriate operational, management, and oversight changes had been made to prevent another unrecoverable situation in the future
  • The members of MM, particularly those with enough professional experience to know better (myself included) never pressed the BOD hard enough to ensure that the BOD knew what problems had occurred, knew how to ensure that they wouldn't occurred again, and were actually providing the oversight to verify that the webmaster was managing the site in a professional manner.
We all failed at multiple levels, and the combination of the failures was such that there was nothing to prevent a possibly simple problem during an upgrade or migration to cascade through all of our cumulative failings and totally destroy or lose over three years of MM forums.

Having said all of the above, I think that it would be the utter height of irresponsibility to engage the same webmaster again to manage the MM website. I think that he did a great job of customizing the website but an abysmal job of ensuring that it was safe, its data was safe, and that it could be restored in the event of a problem.

I realize that this is a very long post and that it has nothing to do with pounding on metal. However, I want to see us learn from history and not repeat the errors of the past any more times.

The business of who 'owns' the website addresses, who owns the websites themselves, who manages the websites, and who hosts the websites are all part of the underlying pieces that hopefully the BOD will get straightened out soon and we can move forward.

I would like to see more communication from the board about the attempts to change, what the changes and attempts are as we go along, and who is making the changes and why. A little visibility would go a long ways.

Thanks, from a long-time MM member, Peter Miles
  #30  
Old 04-03-2010, 10:32 PM
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dabirdguy dabirdguy is offline
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Please bear in mind that I am not on anyone's "SIDE" here, and I barely know any of you.

Internet history has shown that folks that try and take over sites from named organizations all eventually lose. This is sad, because all this will do is cost money and create hard feelings.

Internet legal history and precedent has shown that right or wrong the end result will still be be the same... control of the website will eventually be returned to the legal organization that bears the name. The Board of Directors at that point in time will again own the website, the right to name the place it is hosted, have the right to name an agent, and control its content. The data may be lost and the good name of the site may be ruined in the process. It's happened many times before and will likely happen again. The internet is not a courtroom. There is a governing body and there are rules in place that were written just for this eventuallity.

I suggest that someone in the know (preferably a board member) notify the Internet providers of BOTH the old site and the current one so that the providers are aware that there may be a legal issue and suits filed, and so the providers can take steps to archive the current or past data on a regular basis to protect themselves and to try and protect the users and rightful owners of that data.

Tis a sorry sorry day indeed for all of us.
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