nevermind I think I get the joke now lol

eggplant? umm... harry do you know what teens use that for in the US?

HAHAHA!!!!

I think I found my new emoji

woah ho ho!

hmm... it's too bad there's all those spambot hosts and hacked PC's... otherwise I'd release some kinda worm that tracks code in commonly used one's and delete's them... hell I'd even call it the pacman anti-bot worm... gobbling up them ghosts.

Yeah, it's crazy, but there's nothing really to be done if we want to benefit from it.

Regarding official bots (like Baidu, Google, etc.) we don't want to chase them off. They index the site for their search engines. The rest, all of the spambots, etc., well they don't look at robots.txt anyway so the only thing that would really do any good would be disabling the site for guests...

so why so many bots all the time? and is there a way to edit the robots.txt to chase them off?

quick somebody set off an EMP!

If only the 43 users active right were members.

and 39 lurkers.

Hi Google, oh and late Hi to VSS

whos online with me? google, baidu and bing bots... hi bot friends

]

ah ha noone is one now. time to go streaking.

Xrumer bots?

Yes I do actually! It has been quite a while since I have been able to really log on and check them out. A lot of it is probably Xrumer bots trying to get in but I will definitely look into it!

@"Darth-Apple" You get a lot of Guest traffic here, do you have analytics set up? Anyway of telling if they are bots or actual people. Would be nice to learn where they are mostly coming from and to enhance on that

That’s a point, Facebook advertising is cheap as.. has great analytics, I used it a few times around last year and it really did work! (I advertised my fb page, which in turn people went to my store)

@ Guardian: yeah unfortunately everybody is more into social media... speaking of does makestation have a Facebook page?

I've never had those campaigns work in the past. Just drained REAL quick. If you can't target a forum-accepting audience, it would probably be a waste on today's internet.

I wouldn't put that sort of money into advertising yet, IMHO if you have that sorta money spare for makestation, I'd use it on maybe a custom theme, getting some proper graphics done, get this place all tweaked out then find a few forums that offer advertising to a community that will appreciate make station at the same time as maybe a community referral competition?

hey darth, just keeping an occasional eye on things from my work lol, welcome back btw.

Hope everyone is well this monday evening!

So I just got an email that google is going to give me half off advertising if I spend $150 on it and give me $150 free. It sounds enticing but formal advertising literally did next to nothing for us before.

sounds very handy and a nice upgrade indeed.

We haven't had any issues thus far, but Spork ran an image host for years, his advice is worth heeding. If people outside the community start using it, I can't afford 1TB/day lol. I'm looking into just making a plugin that makes a MyBB-integrated host. It'd have the plus of being very convenient from a user-standpoint, and it could be set to only serve images to this domain as well. If we run into issues at all, that should pretty much absolve them.

@darth: hey I won't tell anybody, makestation is sacred yo.

@Spork: That's something I'm a tad bit concerned about. Really hoping that it that stays within the MS community...

diggin up them holes... gunna dig up them graves... just gotta keep diggin all day, just keep grave digging all day.

Darth, when I was doing image hosting, I was pushing over 1TB per day. It will add up fast when it catches on, just a heads up

Great NECRO!!!!

Necromancy necromancy all for the necromancy lol.

just popped in for a bit...now im off. cheers makestation ghosts

new thread ISP's and the CSR's that ruin your day, for those who want to share or are interested in just how bad CSR experiences can get.

@VSS and a good day to you too sir!

however the first mainly used chat was IRC, and you could link to it from BBS's (Bulliten Board systems, basically proto forums), you coudl also telnet into an IRC chat room in leu of an actual client.

theres spooky bro sup have a nice day

@"Darth-Apple" the precursor to chatrooms? well there was AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, IRC... and then there was a sort of chat in the original BBS's as well but if you go back far enough, there's a command to send a message to someone else on the same server in unix... so back in the old school arpanet.

VSS is live, dont adjust your screens...actually i need to go again, its after 1:43am here

So I was a little bit worried about doing image hosting here being that the bandwidth requirements are pretty robust. Turns out that so far, the entire community only uses about 30GB of the 2TB of bandwidth we have available on a monthly basis. VPS hosting for the win!

Good night VSS!

time to go, have a nice night...or day iam on west coast, cheers

Board reorganization in progress as we speak!

Say what, I didn't know that either.

You can even collapse it!! Click "Shoutbox". Oh Devilshakerz why do you hide these features

My guess is somebody abused this somewhere along the line and the developer disabled it...

why does it change the formatting lol this shoutbox kills me.

[Image: http://www.sherv.net/cm/emo/lol/small-lol.gif]

Have fun VSS, you too!

have a nice day makestation fanatics, time to do some errands

ok that didnt work

test [Image: http://www.sherv.net/cm/emo/lol/small-lol.gif]

That is a brilliant suggestion! Care to make the move?

we totally need just a random meme thread or something... unless we already have one?

Same, was funny.

I loved the Soviet Russia image for the count before staff thread.

so... like this?

http://www.pokemonbattlecreator.com/

It's an online generator thing

0_o rofl

Did you actually name a pokemon that or was that a photoshop lol?

Lmao

Perfect!

LOL

@spork985 http://makestation.net/imagehost/images/rEHxu.png

I guess I'm special. Again.

@spork985 @"Harry K."

HUH? Why no quotations?

@Guardian That tag thing kills me.

[Image: http://makestation.net/imagehost/images/viiFy.jpg]

@"Harry K." Need a Master Ball.

*POP* A wild ultra-rare spork appears

Hello

Hi Spork!

Guardian!

Spork!

test

It being a part of the core build would be great! It's another feature forums need to catch up to social media on.

@SpookyZalost MyBB have plugins for it and are considering it in a later version, but it isn't core yet

I know it can be done beceause it's been done over at this forum I frequent called spacebattles, but that's based on xenforo not mybb

I know at this other forum called spacebattles it can be done, but that's based on xenforo not mybb.

hmm, I wonder if it's possible to tag someone in a thread post other than quoting their post?

It's not a plugin at all if I recall. It's just a feature of the shoutbox. I don't have myalerts or anything so there is nothing for it to really hook into I believe.

I used /me in the counting tread I think I wonder why it does the tagging name when clicking avatar but doesn't actually tag? What plugin are you using Darth?

nice!, hey did anyone notice that the /me command works in the forums? lol.

I suppose that settles that one...

@"Harry K." Does that work?

Haha click my avatar?

Nvm?!?!

@"Darth-Apple" did you forget you could actually tag people? :o

And yeah believe me it's a team effort! I can't even really take the credit. Needless to say things have been going very strong lately here for us.

haha welcome back @e2shock! I got your memo about the featured content, couldn't tell if you were serious or not.

It is impressive!

Amazing how you guys brought the forums back from the dead.

I believe my name should be the same colour as Darths. >

Ahahaha i didn't even notice Leo's name until now. Y'alls guess is as good as mine on that one, but it could be because he's in a special usergroup since he's the leader/moderator of the RPG section.

Good, that's good. :p

Man I don't need a colour to know I'm special don't you worry

Just not in the case of username color HERE. Different color on IB...

Of course you are Harry.

Oh.. So.. So I'm not special?

It is, but that's because Spooky's is a little darker than everyone else.

I feel special

Is my name slighly blue(er)? :ooooo

yo! welcome back to makestation!

What's up Harry!

Hows it going?

yeah no worries man, we all know you're busy with IRL... gods so am I at times lol.

Sounds good Darth, we're keeping busy around here!

Been terribly busy the past few days, but fear not, I'm not absent. I will be back around more within a few days!

he's offering to manually up views/generate traffic for station cash bben.

I will view your YT video for at least 30 seconds.

sorry I am still have trouble understanding Guardian

so if i chose U tube view as the example, what exactly would it be a video of ?

Just trying some simple things to get the marketplace some action.

You pay Station Cash and I will complete the service offered.

sorry im not sure how the guardians shop works ?

Sweet! Have to wait for the baby to wake up before I can hear it. Can't wait.

Heads up, posted the first of my karaoke vids

Haha, that's funny. O sure do hope so. You're on a good pace to do so.

one way... or another... I'm gunna get ya, I'm gunna get ya get ya get ya get ya... lol.

Thanks, and great work! I've been waiting for you to catch me.

also a bit delayed but congratulations guardian!

thanks, gotta keep working to catch up to guardian, and I had some time lol.

Congratulations Leo for being today's top poster at 20 posts! And yeah, I'm trying here to catch up and it's taking me quite a while. Reading all of these one thread at a time.

I know! It's great.

This place is exploding! I log off for less than a day and come back to 40+ new posts...

Thank you Darth! I'm honored.

Hey everyone! Please welcome guardian, our new global moderator, to the team!

just some stuff about the site and forums ect ect.. dont worry i know you have been busy !

darth also i have some messages for you on discord..

looks like we had a bit of a spam attack just now

I think I have an idea of what happened. I'll working overnight tonight but I'll look at it tomorrow morning!

Darth, we need your help in the longest thread.

thomas, great to see you back around and actively posting !!

Welcome back brotherman. Long time no see!

hi

I'm gonna be MIA for the next few days. A lot of exams and long shifts at work ahead. Keep this place alive y'all! I have faith!

Happy easter every 1 !!!

we will have to see what April will bring us

Lot of great changes to the site this month !

interesting.

Y'all notice anything different?

It has! I'm beyond surprised and really happy to see it. Next month we will have officially been a community for five years!

wow the site's certainly become way more active lately, Loving it!

Haha thanks! It takes quotes from members of the community, which i thought was pretty neat

Love the Make Them Famous widget.

Haha no problem @brian51

thanks for working so hard on the site for us !

Sweet!

Well I do have some good news, albeit a little bit technical. But I did manage to uncorrupt the database so that it will allow us to have more than one theme. The good news is that I will no longer have to do design updates on the live site. For quite some time MS has received no refresh due to some of these issues, so i'm glad that things will be a little easier going forward.

That may very well end up being what we do. I'm actually pretty sure you can do a MyBB -> MyBB import too. I might try that to get the posts and the users, and all of that, and just redo the setup of the actual forum itself.

If the update makes changes to the database, circumvent would be upgrading separately, then importing.

Ouch. You try a whole new fresh install of MyBB, then export/import this database?

ooh, that really sucks

We've been running on the same installation of MyBB, and actually the exact same theme, plugins, and codebase, since 2014 or 2015. Besides routine security updates, our codebase literally hasn't changed. i think it was one of the minor 1.8.x updates that screwed up the table in our database.

We have no such installation here, but we do have a development installation on an actual VPS somewhere, where most of our actual development occurs. The problem I'm running into is that I literally cannot import new themes because our database is corrupt, so even if i develop an update, i cannot make it live unless I want to edit our actual live installation.

@hans: have you tried running a backup test server in a vm to test themes and such? Thats how i tested stuff for my bbs Before implementing it. Sort of like a local live you can mess with, without consequences.

I wouldn't object to taking a look at least. Never make promises though.

@Guardian: Hmm I might send you a shout out at some point then and see if we can get this theme issue figured out. I haven't been able to work on anything without updating the live site because only one theme actually works on our installation, so that's been a little frustrating from time to time.

Whenever I can.

Guardian made a strong showing in the forums tonight

Terrible with the design stuff, not bad at figuring out settings issues.

is bryan a member here

Anyone here still sharp on MyBB technical stuff? We've managed to somehow corrupt our themes table and I haven't been able to create a new one to work on a couple of (*minor*) updates to get us a little more up-to-date. I'll look at it in more detail one of these days, but if I can avoid writing a script to uncorrupt it and anyone has more knowledge than I do, shoot me a PM!

okay yes there has been a couple NE sters this week, this morning i was looking at what Quinn was doing

One for the mid and northern east coast.

Ya sorry, not sure what storm your referring to ?

Thanks ya'll! How'd everyone fare with the storm? If you dealt with it? Just a lot of downed trees and power lines.

Ah yeah life comes first always! Haha. But it's good having you around man. And congratulations on the new baby!!

Guardian, i understand your busier with life now.. And that is why I appreciate your efforts all the more to keep this site alive

yes, sweet... Guardian is back !!

I'm still here, just busy with life. The new baby is pulling away a lot of my time. She's screaming right now....

we still have a smalla ctive group. so we need to stay strong togther

its a little dissappointing because it seemed as soon as returned , he left now

well, hes miissin all the fun here

he should be... I think?

I think Guardian is still around

sup

i am still here too ! and hello there Thomas

sup

Yep, still here!

woot still here!

Yeah man! Roll Tide!

Guardian sometimes its your year man , and your team wins it all in drmatic fashion

shout out baby , shout out.. and now guardian.. we are headed for over time !! whooooooo

bama down only 7 points now !

thanks, Guardian.. and the same to all you ghuys here

Happy 2018!

happy holidays guys !