The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

Dear David,

I am afraid I am one of those people who are only just computer literate and rather ignorant of the finer points of running a Forum but am enormously appreciative of all the efforts that it takes to run the TMF which has become a hugely valuable world resource. There is now a massive body of research, information, wisdom, history, facts, photos, opinions and correspondence available for posterity which should be guarded with the utmost care in my opinion. When one thinks of the hundreds of thousands of hours of contributions over the years the mind boggles. Such a priceless creation just cannot be lost---ever.

I would like to thank you humbly and sincerely for all your efforts, past, present and future for everything you have done in the hope that you are willing and able to maintain this totally wonderful Forum.

I can understand that you might think your efforts are unappreciated but I am sure I speak for a huge number of contributors when I say that we are enormously grateful for the TMF and your input. I can also understand there are costs involved which we should perhaps all gladly share.

I have made a donation.

Yours sincerely,

Graham

I have also just made a donation and share the thanks expressed above for your time and patience that you have had over many years with the running of this forum. I know that you have done all of this on behalf of your friend John and that speaks volumes about you as a person and your dedication. It is much appreciated.
Richard

I've "...put my money where my mouth is."

I sincerely hope it helps.

Best regards,
Fran

fran604g wrote:I've "...put my money where my mouth is."

I sincerely hope it helps.

Best regards,
Fran

I too have made a donation and encourage anybody and everybody utilizing the TMF to do the same.

Raphael

David, "Mordeth"

Firstly, very sorry to hear of the bad condition of your friend. Nobody needs to go through this type of pain. I wish your friend the best.

I understand now you've totally blocked HisMastersVoice from the forum, I guess for advocating a migration to the APM platform. I don't see how this can make things any better. On the contrary, seems like the last nail in the coffin.

With the exception of one posting in 2017, your last posting here before yesterday was in February 2011. That does not mean you were not doing things behind the scenes but it's not visible. I've never seen any communication and no response to the many requests or problem reports except by HisMastersVoice. Those responses very often said he could not do anything because his access rights were restricted.

I don't see how donating some money could help at this stage. We've been begging for years and you weren't there. It makes no sense to not to help transition something you've lost interest in years ago. I hope you will consider that.

Thank you.

I have chipped in a bit. I hope it will help.

Speaking for myself, I never knew we had a volunteer techie; to the extent I thought of it at all, I figured the system was run through some service retained by those who set up the forum. A tip of the hat to our secret angel.

For whatever it's worth, yesterday I tried to refresh the index screen and got a message about how the forum is offline because of some coding error and that I should check back daily to see if it was back up. Another refresh shortly after made the issue go away. I report this not as a complaint but as a symptom in case it will be helpful in addressing issues.

More generally, might it be a good idea to put some sort of sticky or whatnot in a prominent place acknowledging the human beings behind the cyber machine? Might help put some faces behind the functions, in a way, and so reduce the "I'm being messed up by a soulless machine" angst.

Valecnik wrote:]Firstly, very sorry to hear of the bad condition of your friend. Nobody needs to go through this type of pain. I wish your friend the best.

Thank you.

Valecnik wrote:I understand now you've totally blocked HisMastersVoice from the forum, I guess for advocating a migration to the APM platform. I don't see how this can make things any better. On the contrary, seems like the last nail in the coffin.

All I did was disable his admin account after he unilaterally shut the site down. He can still use the forum as a member, I have not blocked his access other than his access to admin controls, for which he has cursed me and threatened war. I’m even more glad that I finally revoked his admin access, if that is the level of his maturity. He may think that this forum belongs to him; I do not.

Valecnik wrote:With the exception of one posting in 2017, your last posting here before yesterday was in February 2011. That does not mean you were not doing things behind the scenes but it's not visible. I've never seen any communication and no response to the many requests or problem reports except by HisMastersVoice. Those responses very often said he could not do anything because his access rights were restricted.

At any point he could have made a backup of the database and put a copy of the forum up somewhere else under his control. While I applaud a lot of what he was able to accomplish with fighting spam and moderating this place, the way that he has behaved towards me, especially in the last 24 hours, is completely unacceptable. Had he apologized for not discussing it with me before disabling the site, I might have considered restoring his admin access.

After he decided to threaten me, that will not happen.

Valecnik wrote:I don't see how donating some money could help at this stage. We've been begging for years and you weren't there. It makes no sense to not to help transition something you've lost interest in years ago. I hope you will consider that.

As of right now, I just renewed the domain name for 5 more years. If you want to look this up for yourself, you can go to ICANN and do a lookup by typing in "talkingmachine.info" and you will see:

Registry Expiration: 2024-12-18 03:50:08 UTC
Registrar Expiration: 2024-12-18 03:50:08 UTC
Updated: 2019-12-09 15:58:35 UTC

From that, you can see that the domain is not going anywhere for 5 years, and that it was updated today.

Now all I need to do is update the site and redo this theme to work with the new version of phpBB.

And the donations are for 2 things—1) I was not going to pay out of pocket to rewnew this domain; 2) I would like the site to at least pay for itself (for hosting, if nothing else) if I am going to put any time into working on it. A number of you seem to think that my time has no value.

Anyway, thank you to everyone who has contributed so far, I will start allocating time to upgrading the forum software as soon as I set aside the time. This WILL break the current theme, so it will be disabled until I have a chance to remake it. So once I start upgrading, expect things to look different temporarily.

Regards,

David

Good lord, I never click in this area and didn't know the extent of the troubles. Money sent.

David / MordEth, I had no idea this board was being run by an unpaid volunteer who is not even interested in phonos or records. Thank you! I just contributed via the PayPal button below.

Jim Nichol

David,

Thank you for all that you do.

I'd kind of been wondering what all that HTML code
was that popped up suddenly and randomly yesterday.

Certainly there has been some sort of a power
struggle here that has been ongoing for some time now.

And, of course, there's always the push by certain
folks to get this place all tucked neatly under the
ubiquitous APS paywall ASAP.

I've always really liked the way this place works.
It's great, it's easy on the eyes to read.
Has always worked fine for me.

I honestly do not understand the need for constantly
always wanting to change things which appear to
work ok.

One thing I can always know for sure however is:
If it works nice, then it can't possibly exist
for very long.