[Alex Pepple]

Dear Eratosphereans,

You may have noticed that the server was down for hours on end, lasting more than a day overall.

It became necessary to migrate the server and data to an upgraded system—due to hackers bringing the system to its knees with denial of service attacks more often than not, along with site load timing out often or being unusably slow. This migration was supposed to be a quick process of an hour or so per the assurances of the hosting company, who were using the available migration tools. Alas, it turned out to be an overabundance of headaches because they could not get anything to work properly. So, I had to roll my sleeves and debug and resolve countless issues since the migration job they did left most of the system functions broken or operating badly. Indeed, they left a convoluted and perplexing mess that took me over a day to unravel. I won’t belabor those recondite technical matters here since they’ll make little sense to most. Suffice it to say, we’re back up … well, at least, Eratosphere is. Most of the related systems, such as the Able Muse Review website, are still not functional!

The good news of the migration and upgrade is that the you should notice that the site is much faster now. And it should be able to better resists hackers and denial of service attacks.

The only thing left is to mention that this migration has been expensive and I’ve borne all the cost—which includes the cost of the new and upgraded hardware, a higher monthly “rent”/subscription payment to the web hosting company, and of course their service fees for performing the migration (regardless of the fact that they bungled most of it and then, I’ve been left to fix things … which I’m still figuring out and fixing! Since donations have dried up for an endless number months now, which means that I've been, as usual, carrying all the financial burden on my own, then this is a good time to remind those can or are willing to, of the need to support Able Muse/Eratosphere per all the 'donate' links on the Sphere pages, or the sticky thread here.

Cheers,
...Alex

[Jayne Osborn]

Hi Alex,

I'm choosing to kick this thread off instead of the other ancient one; it's a bit tough to keep seeing my old friend John Whitworth there...

I'm just about to make my donation. Thanks for all your hard work, for letting me be your side-kick and for making Eratosphere exist in the first place!

Cheers,
Jayne

[Allen Tice]

You will get a dona$ion. Busy today.

For some time on my iPhone, I have to sign in each time, still do.

Best

[Jayne Osborn]

I like Allen's use of "dona$ion".

I've ju$t made mine, although it $tarted off a$ a nice round figure of pound$, but fini$hed up a$ an odd number of dollar$ and cent$, with the conver$ion!

I don't expect Alex will mind though. (Drat, I couldn't get an $ in that bit.)

Jayne

[Rob Wright]

Thanks for all you do, Alex. Donation sent.

[Matt Q]

Originally Posted by Jayne Osborn

I've ju$t made mine, although it $tarted off a$ a nice round figure of pound$, but fini$hed up a$ an odd number of dollar$ and cent$, with the conver$ion!

Same here, but I had fun fiddling with the £ amount trying to get a nice round $. I think I ended up a cent off.

[Alex Pepple]

Thank you all!--Matt, Rob, Allen, Jayne. After working at it for the couple of past days now, I'm pleased to report that most of issues have been resolved, and whatever remains is not significant. I've just posted more at length about all that here.

Cheers,
...Alex

(Sorry, just edited it slightly, to spell my name correctly! )
(Sorry--likewise editing nothing at all to add: shocker that I could spell your name wrong, Jayne!)

[Mark McDonnell]

Sincere thanks for all the hard work, Alex. And I have noticed the Sphere is slightly zippier!

Donation sent.

[Jim Moonan]

.
Donation made. Thanks for all your good work, all for good cause. Joining words.

.

[Alex Pepple]

And thanks Jim, Mark ... "zippier" is jus what I wanted to hear! --Alex