POTENTIAL CHANGES at MM - Feedback Please, Ten year anniversary approaching Options

[Cleo_Serapis]

The below email was sent to the membership on Saturday, April 06, 2013:

Hello {member_name}, and to those members eligible to receive bulk emails!

I can't believe it's SPRING in New England! As we approach a FABULOUS milestone on August 3rd: the celebration of TEN YEARS online, I am certainly planning time to dust off the cobwebs and cultivate those seedlings that are ready to bloom from my muse! Care to join in? There are some reminders about our poetry home that I'd like to share with you all. IT HAS BEEN FAR TOO LONG! WHY NOT TAKE A BREAK FROM SOCIAL MEDIA SITES AND COME BACK HOME TO YOUR POETIC INTERACTIVE HOME? Thanks to Eric, Daniel, Larry, Wally and Alan in their limerick thread primarily, I caught wind of the SOS to try and make MM a more active forum as it once was.

Try your muse in this month's Pandora's Chaos challenge located at Monthly Challenges -> Pandora's Box. You must create a response to If Art Could Talk... After a long night out, you return to your house to find that every picture and painting in your house can speak to you. What do the characters in the artwork and photographs say? Your poem or story must incorporate the words, 'sight', 'wash', 'erase' and 'scene' and contain a minimum of 12 lines. Also in Pandora's Box is the newest Book Title Challenge.

Also, check out the latest Time Ten Challenge located in The Acropolis forum at . Perhaps the weekly ten word challenges will spark your muse, or even the Drabbles or Flashes?

I am also reminding all of some changes we made last year to archive the exhibition poetry forum, Plato's Pearls and change the format of posting in the poetry crit forums, Herme's Homilies, Seren's Synapse and Shogun's Psalms. Now, you can simply post a tag line either in the title description or in the beginning of your thread stating a desire for critique (CR) v. no critique (NC). That can be done by simply using CR vs NC with a star, or a series of stars if light, medium, & full critique is desired. As Merlin put it, "This way, whoever wishes critique can request it, and those not desiring a crit will not get one. This way, a person need not feel compelled to thoroughly parse a piece, which may be well beyond his/her capabilities at the stage they might be." This would in no way change the 1:2:2 rules - for each topic you post, you must still comment on 2 other member's posts (and if you seek a crit, then you must provide 2 crits as expected). Merlin's suggestion does not take away workshopping. We're all in favor of improvement and recommend it to those who feel they can benefit. The idea is to offer a choice to crit or not to crit, within the existing forums.

Lastly, I did a bit of house-cleaning and purged our inactive members (with a few exceptions) so you will notice our member count has changed significantly.

I DO hope to see you all soon wandering our lovely halls again. Don't feel like posting a poem - no worries - please stop by and perhaps leave comments to the threads you find of interest. We'd LOVE to hear from you!

Cheers all!
Cleo and the entire Mosaic Musings Management Team

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[Cleo_Serapis]

Hi Denis,

NO - you were not 'cleaned out', lol! Last Sunday and again yesterday, (unfortunately just as we're reviving the site), there was a hack attempt which failed (they never actually got to execute any code, make invalid posts or retrieve any files from the system). But, it did cause the site to react (disallow posts) until we reset the server. We have applied some security patches and continue to monitor the situation and will apply additional patches and code changes as they become available.

The more technical jargon to this (as Peter (Imhotep) states) is:

Ultimately, a forum is just a piece of software. The software is written in a programming language, in Invision's case it's HTML and PHP. The web server (software called Apache in this case) accepts incoming connections from users and translates those requests into actions that Invision (through PHP) needs to process. Invision uses a PHP<->MySQL interface to store and retrieve changing content and statistics (posts, users, post count, online users etc). Once the request has been processed PHP formats the HTML (mostly static, think skin) output and PHP (dynamic, think content) output into a web page and Apache sends that response out to your browser.

So this specific problem is not a specific hack against Invision but a PHP bug exploit. Changing forum software would only fix the problem if that software is doing extra checks on the data and strings that users are sending through to make sure they can't crash PHP. Peter restarted the server again like last week. Should be good. He's also looking at his little log scanning program. It's supposed to look for new core dumps every 10 minutes and restart the server if one exists. Shouldn't be too big a thing to fix, just need to whittle down exactly what bug they're tripping and filter for it...

So sorry for the inconvenience!

If you should have any issue again, please feel free to email me directly at: lkanter@mosaicmusings.net OR cleo_serapis@yahoo.com.

Best,
Lori