Non-motoring > A Vote of Thanks	Miscellaneous
Thread Author: Pat	Replies: 61

Tue 23 Feb 10 17:29   A Vote of Thanks - Pat

I would like to thank all those who have made this forum possible for us. I'm aware of the work and dedication that goes into a project like this. I know also, that this has been a rushed decision and that in itself, would have meant a lot of matchsticks for someone. The moderators, who must have found it so hard to stick their neck out and go against the old and familiar. I'd just like to say that we appreciate your decision was hard, we appreciate the work everyone has done in the background, and we'll all do as much as we can to make this a huge success. Pat Reply to this message | Report message

Tue 23 Feb 10 17:32   A Vote of Thanks - Runfer D'Hills

Seconded. Reply to this message | Report message

Tue 23 Feb 10 17:51   A Vote of Thanks - Old Navy

Yes, me too. Reply to this message | Report message

Tue 23 Feb 10 18:00   A Vote of Thanks - FotheringtonTomas

AOL. Reply to this message | Report message

Tue 23 Feb 10 18:11   A Vote of Thanks - Focusless

ditto Reply to this message | Report message

Tue 23 Feb 10 18:17   A Vote of Thanks - rtj70

Me too. Thanks for whoever made this possible for all of us. And with some new exciting development for how this site is going members will have more of a say. I cannot say more but this forum is about to improve over and above what it is. Or so I was told. Sorry if I've said too much. Reply to this message | Report message

Tue 23 Feb 10 18:27   A Vote of Thanks - -

Quite right, this place feels quite homely already. Reply to this message | Report message

Tue 23 Feb 10 20:52   A Vote of Thanks - Hugo

Nice one guys. I too am grateful Reply to this message | Report message

Tue 23 Feb 10 21:56   A Vote of Thanks - Fursty Ferret

Me too. Reply to this message | Report message

Tue 23 Feb 10 22:03   A Vote of Thanks - Bellboy

seems a nice place to rest my elbows put my feet up and talk drivel so thanks from me too.... Reply to this message | Report message

Tue 23 Feb 10 22:06   A Vote of Thanks - Dave_

>> rest my elbows put my feet up and talk drivel No change there then! ;-) A big thanks from me as well, for all of the reasons mentioned above. Hope it has a long and happy existence. Reply to this message | Report message

Tue 23 Feb 10 23:07   A Vote of Thanks - car4play

Much appreciated. Happily the only matchsticks have come from watching you guys get so excited till the early hours. From our end, without you, and the mods this wouldn't have happened. Mind you that link I happened to see on the right hand side pane to "car leasing in Utah" might not be so appealing to some of you. ;-) Reply to this message | Report message

Tue 23 Feb 10 23:14   A Vote of Thanks - Subariquet

The one for cars in Falkirk looked a little niche. Unless your second name is Bairn. Anyway, given the lack of meandering 'poetry' has Oilrag not made the jump yet? Reply to this message | Report message

Tue 23 Feb 10 23:18   A Vote of Thanks - rtj70

>> Mind you that link I happened to see on the right hand side pane to "car leasing in Utah" >> might not be so appealing to some of you. ;-) I've ordered mine. Pick it up next week. ;-) To the post below. Oily has been here somewhere. He's not oily here - yet. Last edited by: welshy on Tue 23 Feb 10 at 23:20 Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 06:53   A Vote of Thanks - L'escargot

Et moi aussi. Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 08:09   A Vote of Thanks - Netsur

Agreed - however I will miss HJs road tests and those of Martin Gurdon whose humorous deadpan manner was much preferred to the TG style. I wonder how many of us will migrate back if and when the HJ site recovers? Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 08:43   A Vote of Thanks - BobbyG

I only used HJ for the forum, so if all my drinking buddies that I used to have banter and swap motoring stories with, move to a new pub, I will be quite happy in that new pub. Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 08:50   A Vote of Thanks - Netsur

HJ site now down totally. Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 09:03   A Vote of Thanks - rtj70

So it's not just me seeing that. Oh dear. Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 09:13   A Vote of Thanks - Netsur

They really have shot themselves in the foot. I'm not gloating; its sad when such a popular site (and business) is potentially destroyed by technical people who clearly do not know what they were doing. Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 09:17   A Vote of Thanks - L'escargot

>> HJ site now down totally. >> I just checked, purely out of curiosity, and it's still there. Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 09:18   A Vote of Thanks - rtj70

It's not back yes. Down for some modifications first thing probably. They are busy fixing it no doubt. It's not sunk yet. Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 09:15   A Vote of Thanks - L'escargot

I feel honoured to have been invited to join Car4play. I've no doubt that not all members of HJ received the invitation. Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 09:18   A Vote of Thanks - rtj70

What invite? And the people on the other side cannot be that technical. Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 09:20   A Vote of Thanks - L'escargot

>> What invite? Oops! I hope I haven't said too much. Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 09:21   A Vote of Thanks - BobbyG

"As the Back Room has been read-only for the past 24 hours, we thought that it only right and proper to give you an update as to what's been happening and give you an update as to when you can expect to have a fully functioning forum again. We are experiencing some problems with the Back Room as a result of an update to the entire site. This is incredibly inconvenient for everyone concerned, for which we whole-heartedly apologise. In the 10 years that w******************* has been running, the site and backroom has grown organically. We now have hundreds of thousands of extra visitors every month and a re-build of the entire site was required to suit the needs of these extra users. The site was no longer able to keep up with demand and without this rebuild would have soon fallen over. For the moment you can read but not post. We hope to have the back room fully functioning later this week and returned to the forum that you know and love. Thanks for your continuing patience." Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 09:21   A Vote of Thanks - BobbyG

Ha Ha , I love the swear filter intervention! Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 09:22   A Vote of Thanks - rtj70

Swear filter edit I did to the Times entry seems to be working above ;-) Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 16:29   A Vote of Thanks - LINGsCARS

I have just seen this post looking through. Have other people been given invites? This worries me. Why? Surely that gives the impression that data like emails has been used from the HJ forum? Or am I misreading that? I really don't want to be part of any data loss. I think this should be cleared up, not this post hidden. If it gets hidden, I will suspect the worst. Can L'escargot detail the invitation, and can anyone else say if they got an invitation? Or do people have secret user databases? Or was it just a one off because people are in contact seperate to the forum. "Invite" sounds formal, though. Can Mr Khoo comment, please? This makes me very worried about the data protection, would like reassurance. Mods do have access to user emails, I know that. Am I putting 2 and 2 and making 5? Really, who got invites? Ling Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 16:40   A Vote of Thanks - Pat

Well, I found out about the forum from someone who I had freely given my email address to. From that, I also run a Facebook private discussion group, so obviously I invited them to join me on here and between us we asked everyone who we had email addresses for to check it out. It would appear that most of the ones have turned up and liked it:) It's what friends do Ling! Nothing sinister at all. Pat Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 16:41   A Vote of Thanks - Mapmaker

>>Have other people been given invites I received an email from a friend. Presumably you didn't just guess the website address? Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 16:56   A Vote of Thanks - rtj70

Members often exchanged emails behind the scenes on the other site. Even the mods did this presumably. Moderators would facilitate this if asked. Sometimes you'd want to ask something or chat and what you wanted to say was intended for one person so the forum was not the place. So a lot of the regulars used to email each other on that other forum. I know I did. Some members also had their email addresses visible publicly too - I did. Looking and guessing who's here now they are mostly the regulars who used to banter with each other. Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 16:57   A Vote of Thanks - car4play

It would be stupid, foolish, wrong etc. to use emails from the HJ site - data protection and all that - like you say. So we certainly have not done that. I know some found us from a link on an a forum post to a site. I have only told those I knew personally. So maybe that 's all that people here are doing. How did you get here for starters? Maybe others came the same way. Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 17:04   A Vote of Thanks - rtj70

And lets not mention the time when someone hacked the HJ site and stole all the email addresses. It wasn't this site that did the hacking! Last edited by: welshy on Wed 24 Feb 10 at 17:11 Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 17:05   A Vote of Thanks - smokie

Well not-mentioned that man!! LOL Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 17:12   A Vote of Thanks - rtj70

Well some Russian or similar hacker has all the email addresses already. Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 17:19   A Vote of Thanks - henry k

>> Well some Russian or similar hacker has all the email addresses already. >> and I am still getting spam from new sites ( fortunately they all go in my spam bucket) Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 17:21   A Vote of Thanks - car4play

Why are you picking on the Russians? Maybe it was the Chinese hackers that recently did Google. They are pretty smart too. Anyone with inside information here? Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 17:25   A Vote of Thanks - rtj70

I said Russian or similar... Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 19:02   A Vote of Thanks - VxFan

>> Why are you picking on the Russians? Someone told me that they tend to rush in and back out again without anyone noticing. That's how they got their name ;o) Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 19:12   A Vote of Thanks - FotheringtonTomas

>> >> Russians (...) >> >> Someone told me that they tend to rush in and back out again (...) Russians here, Russians there, Russians rushing everywhere Enough to make a Japanesey Chap uneasy. Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 17:07   A Vote of Thanks - FotheringtonTomas

>> Really who got invites? Not me - I worked it out from postings on HJ's site. Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 18:18   A Vote of Thanks - LINGsCARS

OK, maybe I got the wrong impression, sorry :) Can I just ask a final question on this because someone mentioned the hacking: Are passwords stored encrypted? Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 18:30   A Vote of Thanks - car4play

>> Are passwords stored encrypted? Well strictly no because you can reverse encryption. They are one-way hashed, meaning that it's pretty difficult to go back the other way from the hash to the cleartext password. And because we don't use a simple hash either it's even harder. We learnt a lot from the Russian hackers. I always say that nothing is unbreakable. It's just how determined they are. So it might be easier to kidnap a mod, get the admin password and delete stuff in there. But don't do that because we need them just now even though we are not parsimonious with the number of them. Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 18:38   A Vote of Thanks - rtj70

And I'll add hashing passwords is better than encrypting them Ling. As you probably know Ling, something that is unencrypted can be decrypted if you know the keys. Hashing is very different. I am sure if someone worked out the hashing algorithms you could try to reverse them but even then it might not be possible. I learnt a lesson when coding stuff for work. I encrypted a password for use by a 'service' I wrote to make our lives easier. I spent a lot of time on creating a random key, all sorts... then I found out the SQL password for sa was blank! So my code encrypted it and result was a blank password still. So the solution was to pad passwords to maximum and then encrypt (I needed the decrypt part). So no passwords are not stored clear text and are not even stored encrypted. Sorry for the techno speak. Last edited by: welshy on Wed 24 Feb 10 at 18:39 Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 18:58   A Vote of Thanks - FotheringtonTomas

>> And I'll add hashing passwords is better than encrypting Tell that to Alec Muffett. Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 09:25   A Vote of Thanks - L'escargot

>> I feel honoured to have been invited to join Car4play. Mods, please delete my post if you consider it to be contentious. Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 09:33   A Vote of Thanks - Iffy

Les, Would you like to join Car4play? There you go, all is now well. Which gives me the chance to add my thanks to those already posted. I've always thought treating folk like dirt doesn't work, so I hope some people at the old place may have learned something from what's happened. And whatever happens to this forum in future, the last few days have been the most interesting - and fun - time I've had on the internet. Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 09:33   A Vote of Thanks - rtj70

>> the last few days have been the most interesting - and fun - time I've had on the internet. I believe the intention is to try to keep it fun. Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 10:52   A Vote of Thanks - Crankcase

>> >> the last few days have been the most interesting - and fun - time >> I've had on the internet. In that case you need to get out more (to the outer reaches of the internet I mean). After all, how could you compare this experience with the utter amazingness that is zombo.com? Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 15:21   A Vote of Thanks - Iffy

...to the outer reaches of the internet I mean)... Crankcase, The only people I've come across who have been to the outer reaches of the internet have been in the dock of a court. I might give zombo.com a try if I'm feeling brave one day, but then again.... Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 16:15   A Vote of Thanks - Crankcase

Ach, would I recommend anything unpleasant? Heavens to Betsy no. And you can do anything there. :) Reply to this message | Report message

Wed 24 Feb 10 16:01   A Vote of Thanks - Focusless

>> And whatever happens to this forum in future the last few days have been the >> most interesting - and fun - time I've had on the internet. Google / search settings / SafeSearch: on -> off Reply to this message | Report message

Sat 27 Feb 10 16:01   A Vote of Thanks - crocks

Thanks from me as well. >> And whatever happens to this forum in future the last few days have been the >> most interesting - and fun - time I've had on the internet. Just a pity I missed last few days !!! Reply to this message | Report message

Sat 27 Feb 10 16:13   A Vote of Thanks - R.P.

Sorry crocks - word has circulated by word of mouth - takes time ! Rob - Moderator. Reply to this message | Report message

Sat 27 Feb 10 16:34   A Vote of Thanks - crocks

No need to apologise. I just didn't realise how addicted I was until I had to go cold turkey. Reply to this message | Report message

Sun 28 Feb 10 07:00   A Vote of Thanks - MD

Thank God for 4play that's all I can say. Was getting right chuffed off with cold Turkey. Nice to 'see' you guys and gals again. Martin. Reply to this message | Report message

Sun 28 Feb 10 10:18   A Vote of Thanks - Zero

>> No need to apologise. >> >> I just didn't realise how addicted I was until I had to go cold turkey. got bored with turkey curry, turkey sarnies, turkey pie? Reply to this message | Report message

Sun 28 Feb 10 12:48   A Vote of Thanks - Bellboy

just got the left over ham joint i cooked at christmas out of the freezer for last nights tea friday night,you could still taste the whisky marmalade i had cooked it in gorgeousk............. Reply to this message | Report message

Sun 28 Feb 10 14:19   A Vote of Thanks - Dog

Yep! ... Dats a BIG Thankyou from me as well. Reply to this message | Report message

Sun 28 Feb 10 20:32   A Vote of Thanks - Robin O'Reliant

Thumbs up from me, too. Reply to this message | Report message

Sun 28 Feb 10 22:22   A Vote of Thanks - Statistical Outlier

Good work fellas, nice to see everyone back again. Sorry to be late to the party! Gord Reply to this message | Report message