DaemonForums

dchmelik

dchmelik

I prefer FreeBSD UNIX (and Slackware GNU/Linux) desktop but have been trying SysV-based (Open) Solaris/Illumos UNIX, and on old/obscure devices NetBSD UNIX, and on servers, OpenBSD UNIX. I discuss the others in their web-forums, mostly DaemonForums.org, but for a few days (at least a week) it's been down with CloudFlare (ClownFlare) blocking the site because SSL certificate expired. Anyone know if the people/person running this might be back to fix soon?
 
It's primarily an OpenBSD forum. That is, 95% of posts are about OpenBSD, and Mike Lucas mentions the site as a resource in his OpenBSD book.. Not sure if @drhowardfine is correct--if we're thinking of the same person, not sure if that person still runs deamonforums. They might have handed its reins to someone else. But I could be wrong. I am not sure of how many users, etc. That info is probably visible once the forum comes back up. Compared to these forums, it's not very busy.
 
It would be sad if the forum were shut down. There was once a portal with hundreds of thousands of users – oszonе.net. It had a colossal number of topics, replies, useful material, instructions. 300 000 users!!! And then all of it… bam! And they shut it down! All along, along with the users, their posts, their accounts. And how stupid… how stupid… It's all because of money and the mindless pursuit of profit.
"OSZone is a legendary IT resource launched in late 2001 to help novice and advanced Windows operating system users. By 2003–2004, the project had grown into one of the largest technical portals on the RuNet, with a daily audience of approximately 300,000. The resource attracted users with unique content: guides on automatic Windows installation and diagnosing "blue screens of death," supplemented by translations of MSFN articles and original contributions from forum members. Standalone update packages for operating systems (such as UpdatePack-XP and UpdatePack7R2) were very popular. The site boasted, without exaggeration, the best remote Windows diagnostics team on the RuNet. Today, OSZone's era of popularity is long gone. Financial costs for server support, vulnerabilities in the outdated engine, and the administration's reluctance to take risks due to the potential hosting of illegal content or hacking led to the decision to close. Starting August 1st, the resource will switch to read-only mode, and in September 2025, the server will be permanently shut down."
 
I use CloudFlare as a DNS resolver and it gives error code 536, Daemonforums SSL certificate has expired. I recall that this happened several years ago and, after several weeks, service was restored.

In general, the site administrators are responsible and I think would have posted an intent to shut it down. It did have a lot of valuable archived content and howto's.
 
shepper said:
It did have a lot of valuable archived content and howto's.
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This is an important point. The owners of a forum or other social network fully own and control the content. They also have all legal rights to your content. A regular user, from a legal perspective, is simply a laborer who, upon registration, reads an "agreement" that doesn't even protect their content from force majeure. My point is: as I wrote above, a forum with 300,000 users disappeared. And then they ask, "Where does the information go?" It seems to me that a forum with 25 years of content was simply sold to AI owners. And what happened: people were deprived of the right to use the information. The AI was fed on this forum. So, people, like bees, laid honey for 25 years, and some scum, with leverage and money, bought it all for their AI model.
 
To add to drhowarddrfine's comment, at the old BSDforums, the owner became quite ill. Some other members wanted to buy it from him, don't know the story of what happened, I think said owner was either being coy, or maybe just too ill to do anything, someone started daemon forums (I think that is who drhowarddrfine was referring to earlier), and it looked like it would become the new BSDforums (not just FreeBSD, though that was the main focus at the time), then these forums began, which is when daemonforums gradually become more OpenBSD focused.
 
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Only j65nko was running the site. I talked to him briefly at the start of the year and he was dealing with terminal cancer. I don't have the details right now as they were in a PM on daemonforums, but I seem to recall "a year and a half at the most left". But, well, these things tend to have significant error bars.

I fear that j65nko is probably too ill to fix things, if not worse.

A more ordered shutdown/archival would have been nice, but I guess his illness caught up with him faster than anticipated. You always think you have more time...

-- Martin / Carpetsmoker

scottro said:
To add to drhowarddrfine's comment, at the old BSDforums, the owner became quite ill. Some other members wanted to buy it from him, don't know the story of what happened, I think said owner was either being coy, or maybe just too ill to do anything, someone started daemon forums (I think that is who drhowarddrfine was referring to earlier, and it looked like it would become the new BSDforums (not just FreeBSD, though that was the main focus at the time), then these forums began, which is when daemonforums gradually become more OpenBSD focused.
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There were two moderators at bsdforums: jk65nko and Phoenix. Both had very limited abilities to stop spam, IIRC they couldn't even ban accounts: just move posts to a "Trash" forum. Stopping spam was a lot of manual work.

The owner of the forum was absent and didn't respond to any communications. I ended up phoning him to explain that there's a big issue – back then people tended to have their actual address and phone in whois. He said that he was working on a new forum or something, and that it would be fixed soon. I said all he had to do was appoint one or two people as admins so they could actually stop spam accounts. He never did that. That must have been late 2007 or early 2008.

Later I found out that both j65nko and ocicat had also phoned him, probably around the same time. Also to no effect.

I don't recall any illness on the part of the bsdforums.org owner, or people offering to buy the site (I certainly never did, and I'm pretty sure j65nko didn't either). All we asked was for some proper mod/admin rights to stop spam. After we started daemonforums we started redirecting new members on bsdforums.org there and the bsdforums owner told j65nko to stop, who replied "by giving him a bit of a bollocking".

I started daemonforums with Kienjakenobi. My memory is a bit vague on this, but from what I recall he was a new member on bsdforums, saw the complete mess, and we got things running. I don't recall how we got in touch. I think he paid for the vBulletin license, or maybe we shared it? I can't imagine paying it because I didn't have a lot of money at the time.

He dropped off fairly early on, guess just due to drifting interests? IIRC he was a physics student in Switzerland(?)

All of that was in early 2008, we lost a lot of people in the migration. And then the Stack Overflow/Exchange network was getting started at around the same time, as well as this forum. We lost a lot of traffic to both of those.

I handed things over to j65nko in 2014, due to drifting interests on my part. I haven't really been involved since.
 
arp242 said:
Only j65nko was running the site. I talked to him briefly at the start of the year and he was dealing with terminal cancer.
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That's very sad news.

Presumably ocicat has no access to the hosting, so it could very well be the end of the road. It was a great site and resource, despite the low traffic.
 
That is very sad news. He was incredibly helpful on those forums, not to mention it's a horrible thing to happen to anyone. arp242, as you say, around 2008, so my memory might be hazy, but a member called DrJ and I were friendly and I think it was he who mentioned the BSDforum guy being ill, but I could easily be wrong. And I remember the work you put into getting daemonforums going, and though I probably said it then, thank you again.
 
scottro said:
That is very sad news. He was incredibly helpful on those forums, not to mention it's a horrible thing to happen to anyone. arp242, as you say, around 2008, so my memory might be hazy, but a member called DrJ and I were friendly and I think it was he who mentioned the BSDforum guy being ill, but I could easily be wrong. And I remember the work you put into getting daemonforums going, and though I probably said it then, thank you again.
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Ah yes, DrJ! Introduced me to RPN calculators. I remember I posted some old nVidia video cards to him. I wonder how he's doing – from what I recall he was in his 70s, and that was almost 20 years ago.
 
I no longer have his contact information, but yes, it was a long time ago. I haven't seen him on any tech forum in years. I know he was working on some sort of medical testing idea that he had hopes for. (He was a real doctor, I don't know if an MD or science related Ph.d).
 
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