Casio-Scene shuts down

[nikitouzz]

i don't speak english...

je voudrais m'exprimer sur le sujets quand même....

ce qui se passe est horrible d'une part au niveau de la perte de plusieurs centaine de fichier/dossiers.... c'est inadmissible le comportement qu'a cette personne qui n'est même pas dans la communauté casio ou TI...

le comportement de cette personne est tel que beaucoup de programmeur sur casio ont arrêter la programmation ce qui est déplorable pour la communauté casio...

j’espère que sa va s'arranger au maximum que helder7 ( que je soutiens ) n'auras pas de problème et que si il veut de l'aide il peut nous demander j’espère aussi que les fichier pourrons être récupérer aussi...

[DJ Omnimaga]

No problem, actually for the others here's the english translation

What is happening now is horrible in the way that several hundreds of files and folders were lost... The behavior of this person who is not even involved in the Casio or TI community is unacceptable...

This person's behavior is such that many Casio programmers have quit programming, which is disappointing for the Casio community...

I hope that it will get resolved so at least Helder7 (who I support) doesn't have any problem and if he needs help he can ask us. I also hope that the files will be recoverable too...

Also welcome to the forums nikitouzz (bienvenue sur le forum )

[nikitouzz]

thank's Dj_O

[Art_of_camelot]

@Nikitouzz: Welcome, we also have a french section here. If you want, you can also use google translate for english posts. It isn't perfect, but we can usually figure out what you mean.

Bienvenue, nous avons aussi une section française ici. Si vous le souhaitez, vous pouvez également utiliser Google Translate pour les postes anglais. Il n'est pas parfait, mais on peut généralement trouver ce que vous entendez.

[nikitouzz]

No but I already know the site practically by heart I everything in daytime ^^ visits the site I begin any young few has to be known just a little in the French community of TI, I am already very active on TI-planet and I am moderating on espace-TI.

[Juju]

Hey, you should post in Introduce yourself.

[Juju]

Hm, I see. In short, Matt got his life pretty busy, leading him to not take care of CK as much as he wanted until he realized that site was more important than he thought, Helder, wanting to save the website, restarted the site over and didn't asked permission to (which I understand is pretty annoying to Matt) or just didn't contacted him to see what's up with the site (who would otherwise bring the site back up). Then it escalated into a bunch of hate mail and stuff like that, making both parties look like bad guys to each other.

I suggest to just start over and try to reach an agreement while respecting each other, probably to merge both copies of the site into Casio Kingdom (Matt would probably retain ownership) then do like nothing happened.

[Netham45]

I'm not saying that what went on was right, but the fact that the site was hacked a fairly long time ago and you're just now getting to it shows a striking level of negligence and indifference towards the community.

Helder trying to revive the community and save the data is, in my opinion, morally sound, though the means of which he did it is not.

To be honest, I highly doubt that anyone will come back to Casio Kingdom after you essentially ignored it for three years, even through a significant security breach.

Also, in the calculator community (Well, at least in the TI one), you need to realize that most people don't see code and posts as 'owned' by the site, but by themselves and the community, so to most people neglecting the site is far worse than copying it.'

Pardon me if I'm missing something, I've only been aware that Casio Kingdom ever existed recently.

[helder7]

Hey matt, thank You for You stop your "email war" ! Now is 02:56 AM in my country, im working hard in my new project (ps: youre the first external person to known about it   ) i really need sleep, now...

But i will put my full response to You in some hours...

Wtf, You contacted the host? Lol... Fake, The site is hosted in a dedicated server property of one my friend...

[DJ Omnimaga]

Hi Matt, thank you for posting your side of views in the topic.

Regarding making money from a website or having hosting being paid by other people, I see nothing wrong with it if it involves placing ads on the site or selling products. In fact, Omnimaga, although not directly from the administration itself, has been selling music for 8 months now (although there are no ad yet). So far that generated at least $71.16, which is not even close to what it costs annually to host the website and purchase contest prizes. There also used to be a donation form, but it was removed.

The only problem is like what Netham45 said: In the TI and Casio calculator programming community, people are in a constant battle to keep it alive, and to prevent massive loss of useful information, people from both communities will be ready to do anything to save a website, a forum, a file database or group of tutorials. I do not agree with the way helder7 did it, if it involved accessing the domain name and website setup without having first gotten the login info from you, but in 2011, almost every file on Casiokingdom were 404'ing, nobody could register forum accounts anymore, and eventually, even post at all. By then, it was believed that the site was about to shut down entirely. Also, I recall people saying in 2010 or 2011 that you or former admins were contacted as an attempt to re-host the site or fix it, to no avail. So afterward, the CK salvage project was born, although nobody knew how the CK domain name was accessed.

For the most parts, most files in Casio-Scene archives were retrieved from the Wayback Machine, as they were no longer available on CasioKingdom due to PHPNuke bugs and security holes. About 400 extra files were added in 2012 on Casio-Scene, which were never uploaded on CK before. The forum database that Casio-Scene used dated back in Early 2009, before you bought the site. Helder7 most likely got it from one of the original CasioKingdom admins.

I guess the best thing would have been that Helder7 contacts you first to ask permission, then if no reply occurs within the next month or two, copy the site anyway per TI/Casio community mentality principes, although I guess he only thought about saving CK content at the time.

As for now, the idea I had in mind was that on www.casiokingdom.com, you simply replace CasioKingdom's copy of the site with Casio-Scene's, so that way you ensure you have a much more stable CMS than PHPNuke, and have Casio-Scene show a message saying that the site has moved back to CasioKingdom. Or of course the current Casiokingdom site could be converted from the 2011 version, then the 2012 Casio-Scene additions added. And of course add an anti-spam and put the ads back online. That way the community will be happy.

Also Netham45 Casiokingdom existed since 2003, but in 2006 the admin left, before returning to update his site into a full community. In 2009 he finally retired for real, selling the site to Matt, then fell into despair.

Also Helder7 he most likely ended up with your friend's ISP.

[Juju]

Yeah, as a professionnal computer science technician, there was 2 points that sounded fishy in the claim of hacking the site to bring it back.

First, the complete database, including stuff normally hidden from the users such as passwords. It dated back from early 2009, which is before Matt bought the site. The legality of this is pretty much a gray area.
Secondly, how Helder7 got access to the CK domain name to point it to CS, then how Matt got it back. I had a theory Matt forgot to renew it, but it doesn't make sense. I would like to know how you did it.
Thirdly, Richard M. Stallman would kill you for using the word hacking like this.

Also, for the passwords, they are usually stored encrypted in a way they would be unencryptable without spending months of computer times on each one (see the MD5 or SHA1 algorithms), so you passwords are safe.

And the best would be that Matt would bring back his Casio-Kingdom copy from 2011, then merge the new data from Casio-Scene in.

[DJ Omnimaga]

I don't think there was lack of domain name renewal, else there would have been a brief period of time where CK would have stopped working completely or it would have been squatted.

Also juju, even if passwords are encrypted, if a website CMS is filled with security exploits, I wouldn't be surprised if someone could get access to files he's not supposed to have access to. While it probably won't give access to the hosting account, if the admins stored the passwords in their PM inbox in case they forget, then that can be accessed instead. Also, the original admins cannot have given away any password, as themselves lost access to the site after it was sold. You are probably not familiar with PHPNuke, as it is old and nobody use it anymore, but back in 2004-2006, it was very notable for its security exploits. Only PwsPhp was worse. On top of that, the board built-in PhPNuke uses PhpBB2, which, back in the days, also had a few security issues which left your site vulnerable if not updated.

Also even if they had no copy of the database beforehand to create Casio-Scene, you don't need access to a site database to copy its content: You just need a crawler converter (like we used to import the old Omnimaga posts into the new Omnimaga site) that is compatible with PHPNuke. If Casio-Scene didn't import PMs, that could have been a possible scenario. That's actually how the old TI-BANK posts were added to TI-Planet (although Mic's posts were all deleted, along with his files and account). In May 2011, Mic was about to shut his board down, so Jim Bauwens quickly wrote a script to copy the forum HTML on his server. The TI-BANK board was finally shut down for real 13 days later. So only 13 days of posts were finally lost.

[alberthrocks]

matt:
I think it's perfectly fine if you have ads on the website, but ONLY IF YOU MAINTAIN IT. You're simply milking a website if you ditch it and still get money from it. If you're not maintaining it, OK, sell it for a cheap price or give it away to a trusted admin. They can foot the hosting bill. And besides, ad revenues from a dead site are kinda small.

Also, the Internet is not a legal fiesta. You can't punish anyone for "hacking", especially if it isn't really "hacking". Copyright laws hardly exist for the Internet. A legal case will almost immediately get dismissed. Besides, you guys also live in different countries... do you really expect magical cross country legal action, especially when the world is short on cash?

I understand that you are upset, but does that mean you should spam someone who you're not even sure is the culprit? Does that mean you can behave inappropriately on the internet? Does that mean you can toss cuss words in BIG CAPS on a home page?

You got those angry emails because of your actions. A good rule of thumb, both in the real world and the virtual world: if you want respect, give it. The reverse also applies: if you don't want respect, don't give it. You pretty much did the latter.

How about we start off fresh? You both apologize to each other (right here, in this topic), and then have a meaningful discussion about what happened.

[DJ Omnimaga]

By the way, does Google Adsense detect if click through ads are bots or not? Because if CK gets a lot of money from ad revenues with so few members visiting it, then that means that a lot of the revenues are generated by undetected spambots and web crawlers.

Omnimaga used to average at 900000 page hits per month, not counting external pages and sub-domains such as the ASM Unsquisher, old copies of the site and image folders. After the site was modded to almost completely eliminate spambots, the traffic dropped to 600000.

[Juju]

I think Google Adsense have a pretty nice detection of spambots, don't remember though. It would detect if someone clicked too much and other abnormal activities. I guess it would work if someone has a shitton of IPs in every range and would click with a different IP each time.