The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

I’ve been absent for work and sickness reasons—it’d figure that I finally get a day off and I felt like a zombie and slept through most of it, but I wanted to try to catch up with this thread at least.

I’d like to thank everyone who has commented in support of John’s and my efforts, although he really deserves most of the credit, since my involvement has mostly been a result of my friendship with him. Plus, ‘The Buck Stops Here!’ sign is on his desk.

phonophan79 wrote:I've stuck here with TMF because, aside from the generally friendly atmosphere, John and David have done a good job with self-hosting this phpBB (NON-proboards) formatted forum.

I still wish that I had originally pushed harder to convince John to use phpBB, but he’d wanted to stick with ProBoards because that was what everyone was used to using. Unfortunately at that time, I hadn’t considered that they’d yank you and not give you your content, but I knew that they did not offer any sort of admin-accessible backup features (unless you wanted to save each and every page of every thread manually).

Based on our experiences with ProBoards, I would not recommend using any sort of board system that does not allow you to save and restore your content, and even if you don’t want to self-host (which costs money), there are free providers that offer phpBB. Sure, you don’t get a domain like ‘forum.talkingmachine.info’ for free, but you can count on having everything even if the board host pulls the plug. (And one can purchase domains for around $10/year. So it’s not like the domain name is expensive.)

beaumonde wrote:And, by the way, a couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon Dan's new site, under the same old name, and hosted by invisionfree. I don't think it's terribly active, and most of the posts seem to be started by either Dan or Phil O. I got bored with it rather quickly...

Personally, I find it rather funny. His blog still advertises it as “the #1 Antique Phonograph related message board on the web.” Obviously that isn’t based on posts or members, since 2,260 and 101 are very small when compared to 13,952 and 285. Out of all of the forums out there, his is doing the worst. Plus, Dan is such a computer genius that he hasn’t figured out how to change the default Invision theme colors not not look terrible with the banner that Mooo made for him.

It seems that one or two people are willing to stick with him and support him despite all of the lies, though.

With nearly a year between claims (#1 & #2), no progress has been made:

Dan (on his blog) wrote:The detailed data from the old board is still available on google's cache and I will be having a buddy at google trans-load all the information to the new URL.

...and a year later, there is no visible progress to be seen. But surely, he cannot be lying—there must be some sort of delay or reason why there’s nothing to be shown for his (and the buddy at Google’s) efforts!?

Dan (on the NTVMMB) wrote:A lot of it is archived at google.com.

The host of the old board had archives of the board but it was so mangled that very little could be salvaged. I do have a bunch of stuff on a remote drive but it's voluminous to the point that it would be a daunting task to actually pull and convert it to add to this board.

Currently, this board is being backed up (as are virtually every other website) by the Library of Congress and a number of other groups cooperating in a web archiving process.

Sure, there are still stubs of links at Google (which now point nowhere), but it’s no longer in the cache (and has not been for months), so there is nothing at Google to recover.

If there is any truth to what he has to say about ProBoards’ archives, it’s yet another reason to shun their services like the plague, but from his antics in their support forum, it seemed that they wanted nothing to do with him and he’s probably trying desperately to maintain the fiction that his board went away because I hacked it.

I wonder if CuratorBob is actively involved in backing up the NTVMMB or if he is still too busy pursuing me for nonsensical crimes against phonographs?

Is there anything that the Library of Congress isn’t doing?

...and to go slightly more off-topic:

gramophoneshane wrote:It's a shame the online site is considered unsafe. It's funny that porn sites have a bad reputation for being loaded with viruses, but I found that my old computer picked up viruses in my searching for gramophone information more than anything else.

It’s amazing just how much malware is spread by legitimate sites (including Facebook as recently as October), but most users aren’t aware of just how prevalent this is. The worst part is when the malware is the result of malicious content delivered via advertising which seems to happen more often than it should (and usually ends up on large numbers of legitimate high-profile sites).

If you’re still using Internet Explorer (the big computer-destroying blue ‘e’), particularly without anti-virus software, you’re asking to have your identity stolen or malicious things done to your computer.

IE7 (the most-used version on this forum) currently has 11 unpatched advisories. By comparison, Firefox has 0...as does Google Chrome...and Opera...and Safari. And newer and older IE aren’t really safer. IE8 has 3 unpatched advisories, whereas IE6 has a whopping 24.

So basically, not only are every other FREE browser out there a better, faster, safer choice for your use, but the crap that comes with your computer most likely won’t be fixed until next year. If then. And of course, they have such a great track record.

So once again let me suggest to everyone: download either Firefox, Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari or Opera.

JohnM wrote:Not 100% sure all Lexmark products are still made in Lexington, but since it is an American company, the buck(shot) should stop here.

Based on the information on Wikikpedia, I would assume that at least some or all of the hardware is built overseas, but their R&D is done in Lexington. So while they may not be ‘Made in America‘, they are ‘Designed in America’.

On the other hand, Epson is a Japanese company. They may well have manufacturing locations in China, also.

Anyway...I really should try to get more sleep, and again, thank you to everyone for supporting our efforts.

— MordEth

jesus. I'd never read those posts of his to the proboards people. was he serious? the ranting comes across as at best jestful, at worst delusional. and I can see why proboards would opt to simply wash its hands of the entire mess and just delete all the accounts involved, including the older version of this forum. but really, death threats? acting attorneys? access to deleted accounts required due to pending criminal prosecutions?

and the incessant talk of trolls... for my own edification, I still don't get the whole troll thing... this catch-all seems to include not only scammers and spammers but also simply unaffiliated visitors who simply browse and read?

MordEth wrote: The worst part is when the malware is the result of malicious content delivered via advertising which seems to happen more often than it should (and usually ends up on large numbers of legitimate high-profile sites).

It's for that reason that I use Firefox with the the Adblock Plus add-on.

And because so many legitimate sites have been hacked, and because I've been redirected a few times to one of those bogus anti-virus software pages, I've set Firefox to prompt me when sites are trying to redirect my browser:

Click on Tools
Click on Options
Click on Advanced
Click on General tab
Click on box next to "warn me when web sites try to redirect or reload the page." This means I manually have to refresh some pages, but it's worth it to me for the added security.

Hard to believe it's been a year since all that poop went down. As sad as it was to lose all that collected knowledge, part of me likes the fresh start. Gives everything a sense of closure.