216 members removed for inactivity

Today I took the decision to remove members who never activated their account. This count stood at 216.

Inactive members are those who never validated their email address, and therefore served no real purpose for being listed as a "member" on RAF.

RAF Rules Updated!

The RAF Guidelines have been updated:

They are now as follows:

1. Spamming is prohibited.
2. Posts that are disparaging toward any religion, race, nation, gender, or sexual orientation are strictly forbidden.
3. No harassment of any type or form towards any member of RAF will be tolerated.
4. Profiles may not be offensive, vulgar, profane, or abusive.
5. Pointless, excessive, or obscene cursing is prohibited on RAF.
6. Graphical sexual posts are prohibited. Threads of a sexual nature are also prohibited.
7. The use of multiple usernames is not permitted.
8. Excessive Web site promotion is not allowed on RAF.

Review penalties and further explanations here.

RAF Updates to 2.0 + Server Issues

Yesterday, Sunday June 19, 2011 began for me when still in bed I jolted to consciousness after I browsed my email. For the second time in two weeks, and exactly one week a part, I received yet another email from HostGator (our hosts) notifying me that RAF was suspended for using too much server resources (CPU). This was 10am.

I was informed that the Forum (software made by Simple Machines) was somehow at 3/4am in the morning using excessive amounts of the server's resources. I was determined to get to the bottom of this. A long story short, I'm not convinced that it is indeed RAF that's causing issues with the server; our community may be big, and may be relatively active, but we are not that big and that active to cause the amount of usage we're accused of. To make matters more suspicious, the spike in activity was at a time that the forum sees the least amount of activity.

I decided to play it safe and do something that I've been meaning to do for a week now; and that's update the SMF software to the latest and final build/version: SMF 2.0 . It was my intention to hopefully resolve the issues with load-balancing, along with bring fresh new features to our users along with our staff.

At 11am I began the 30 minute process to update the forum from SMF 1.x to 2.0. It was complete with minor problems.


SMF Logo



Very well, the forum seems intact; the member-list looks unchanged and the topics/posts looked good. Time to get to the more challenging aspect: installing modifications to replicate RAF 1.x.

For reasons which I'm still trying to get to the bottom of, our package manager (the thing that allows us to install modifications) is not functioning as it should. This is evident by the lack of a few mods we've became accustomed to: youtube codes, permanent font colors for our special members, karma descriptions, more statistics on the Stats page, the ability to see who logged in in the last 24 hours, among others.



Hopefully the issue will be discovered and solved quickly. If not quickly, we just have to hope that 2.0 is "stable" enough for us to enjoy posting! Not to mention fix the "overuse" issue and stop our host from suspending our account... again.

By 11pm I decided that it was time to give my eyes a rest, and leave the issues for another day. The forum seems stable enough; no?

Here's a really convoluted list of everything that was changed since SMF 1.x.

Thanks to Bear for his 2nd donation!

What do we have here? Another respondent to our recent plea, perhaps? Yep! Bear/Warren Bearclaw has donated for the second time recently.

For his contribution, Bear will be awarded 50 karma points, advertisements will no longer show on the Forum, and possibly most importantly, he will now shine gold!

Thanks again Bear!