I.T. tech. BlueEye Welcome

[aplumma]

We have been very lucky to have a new person come on board to help us straighten out our site. Blue Eye Aka Chad has come on board to help us straighten out some of the issues that we have been muddling thru. He is making changes that will speed up the board and lower our costs on the board. We hope to have less issues with different browsers and speed up loading of the pages. He will also be reading the computer section and answer questions as he has time. He is doing this as a favor to the board and he should be afforded all of the courtesy's you show to all of the other owners of the board. He has full powers of moderation and we back him 100%. So please welcome and say hi and thanks for his efforts to keep this board working smoothly.

 

 

Welcome Chad and thank you for your time and efforts.

 

Art

[BlueEye]

Thanks for the kind words and warm welcome Art! My first week on the job and the top post is "Locked Out" haha - at least everyone here has a good sense of humor.

 

As we mentioned before, we don't have any control over the server or hosting itself but I will be happy to look into and help others with any other issues they may have.

 

Thanks again -

Chad

[ccmtcanada]

Welcome to the jungle Chad! Thanks for your help in keeping this board going. It's much appreciated!

[Old Ironmaker]

A new Sheriff in town. Welcome Chad. We need all the help we can get. Now that I have had the opportunity to join several other forums from gardening to Pro Football I always find it very interesting what is a suspend able offence on most sites isn't a big deal on this site. I.E. on most sites they don't want you quoting large posts that have multiple pics and or videos just to refer to an original thread or post. I guess I takes up big space on the server unnecessarily. On the old Buffalo Bills.com doing that would get you a mod Q and eventually a invitation to leave permanently. The other biggie to many is copyright infringement. I was basically kicked off another local fishing forum for my second copyright infringement. Knowing what exactly that means would be a first step in not infringing. I copy and pasted an article word for word including the publication/date and author thinking I have all the bases covered and that's a no no. I thought it was what you need to do, newspapers do it all the time without naming the author. Here it happens every day. I really can't see the Washington Post or L.A. Times going after Stomp in a court of law in London to sue him, for what I wouldn't know. He seems to be paranoid concerning being sued over copyright laws.

 

I really have a question after all that Bull above, what is copyright infringement as defined by this site Chad?

[DaveRoach]

Welcome Chad, Thanks for your efforts

[BlueEye]

Thanks guys - much appreciated!

 

IronMaker - To try and answer your question - I have run into similar issues myself on my other websites. I am no lawyer by any stretch of the imagination but what I have always found is a simple link to the original article keeps you out of trouble more than copying the entire article. I don't see any issues with quoting specific paragaraphs or sentences but copying the entire article to post is frowned upon more than just putting up a link to the article. Along those same lines, I know of people who are "outdoor writers" and websites pay to have their content posted on their websites only. So if someone copies the entire thing and re-posts it somewhere else then they tend to not like that. Some of them don't mind but most of them would prefer a link back to the original article. That has been my experience as I have run into this exact issue a couple times on my other forums.

 

-Chad

[aplumma]

If you are quoting or copy and pasting just bold the content and give credit to the website and author. If they contact us we will then remove it. We do not have many issues of this what we need people to think about is that what they post is archived and if the authorities request a copy of a persons content we will gladly turn it over to them. That means do not type illegal actions or threats on the board,keep in mind what you say is forever here.

 

 

Art

[GBW]

Thanks for helping us all out Chad and welcome to the site

[BlueEye]

Thanks GBW!

 

Just curious is anyone here a member of Muskies Canada? I am a member of the Gananoque chapter. They have a great two day outing every year that I participate in held at the Glenn House.

 

Take care,

Chad

[grimsbylander]

Hi Chad and welcome. Sounds like you will have a positive impact on the site and you're a fisherman to boot!!

 

I'm not a member of Muskies Canada but I sure love fishing the Gananoque stretch of the river. Scenic, clean and a tremendous fishery.

[OhioFisherman]

Welcome Chad! Nice to have help keeping the board flowing smoothly!

[misfish]

Does this mean Roy has retired?????????

 

Welcome Chad

[aplumma]

No Roy is still part of the crew he has his hands full with the kids and stuff. He will still take care of the bills and the back room of the board with help from a few others.

 

 

At

[misfish]

No Roy is still part of the crew he has his hands full with the kids and stuff. He will still take care of the bills and the back room of the board with help from a few others.

 

 

At

Thanks Art

[ketchenany]

No Roy is still part of the crew he has his hands full with the kids and stuff. He will still take care of the bills and the back room of the board with help from a few others.

 

 

At

Ask him to pop in once in a while, his moments are missed!

[npt1]

Welcome to the board Chad,

OFC is a wealth of information site, and with you onboard, it can

only get better,

 

Cheers.

[manitoubass2]

welcome aboard

[Old Ironmaker]

Thanks Chad for the info re: Copyright Infringement. If I was told that when I read rules of the site I wouldn't have done what I did. I as well missed 7 years of Law School. I don't know if our site states the explanation as well as you and Art did. I'll check, after all I am a stickler for any rules, oh yea, insert a cute wink, wink emoji here.

 

I checked the rules and all it says and I copied word for word is; "Please do not post copyrighted material."

 

I see posts with the entire article posted here many times. One reason I thought it was OK to do since I didn't know what copyright material is. I come from that generation that set the VCR to record and replay ball games and TV shows. I never heeded those warnings by Interpol and the FBI. You guys might want to elaborate on what I pasted from the rules.

Edited April 13, 2017 by Old Ironmaker

[ketchenany]

Chad, welcome, I use my iPads, I have two. The. older one as of today cut things off and can't reply or post!

Would this be a problem with older technology?

Some of us can't upgrade . . .

 

Thanks

[misfish]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ And some just hate change. LOL ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

[BlueEye]

Thanks again everyone for the warm welcome!

 

ketchenany - I have an old iPad myself at home so i will take a look at it for you on that and see if I can duplicate the issue. I won't be able to look into it until late tonight when I get home but I will see what I can find.

[fishindevil]

welcome aboard chad !!!! thanks for your help....and glad to have you ....

[Sterling]

Welcome aboard Chad,

 

While this thread is getting attention, I should point out a flaw in the board that I brought up in June 2015 here: http://ontariofishingcommunity.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=79315

 

After some additional research I can say with confidence this is a major problem. As in, possibly/partially responsible for a major loss in traffic.

 

In the forum header is an "ad container" called ipsAd. This container is used for, you guessed it, ads. Clearly defining where ads are located on a web page helps search engines locate content. Notably in this case, it helps AdBlockers locate ads. AdBlockers are on pretty much every machine these days, and even come native in some browsers like Firefox and Safari.

 

In April of 2015, the ipsAd container was expanded to contain the entire forum root, ie; all of the content. I'm not sure why this was done, whether intentional or not. Perhaps it was done to prevent people with adblockers from viewing content. Either way it's a huge no-no.

 

Take a look at the site snapshot from March 25, 2015; http://web.archive.org/web/20150325095208/http://ontariofishingcommunity.com/forums

 

All of the content is viewable.

 

Now look at April 8th, 2015: http://web.archive.org/web/20150408125844/http://ontariofishingcommunity.com/forums/

 

All of the content became hidden at this exact point.

 

If you go to the yearly summary for the site in the year 2015, you'll notice that after this change occurred, WayBack engine stopped recording frequent snapshots of the site. That's because it recorded little to no changes in the snapshot. This in itself is a problem because crawlers started perceiving the site as stagnant and may have stopped indexing content as well. I'm positive that at this point, site ranking took a hit.

 

http://web.archive.org/web/20150315000000*/http://ontariofishingcommunity.com/forums

 

Google is not seeing the content either, if you look at cache; http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KQFj2U-uqCIJ:ontariofishingcommunity.com/forums/index.php%3Fshowforum%3D2+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca

 

Luckily it appears to be indexing content just fine.

 

Site traffic corroborates this theory; from April to December 2015, first-time visits dropped 50%, as did unique visits. There is a seasonal drop every year in this period of about 30%, so one might conclude the change resulted in a net traffic loss of 20%. As expected, returning visits were not affected as much, as these users know to turn off ad blockers in order to view content.

 

I hope I'm overreacting, but these don't seem like coincidences to me. This is an easy fix that should be #1 priority!

 

 

Being the owner of a large forum myself, I understand the need for ads to keep the site alive. But my company enforces the use of ad blocker and I can't remove it. I can easily whitelist the site in my ad blocker settings though (which I've done), but others may not know how to do this.

 

I did find your problem upon inspecting the forum code though. The entire content is nested within the ipsad container, which is meant for ads. Adblocker will block anything found within this container. Simply move it out of that container (or rename it) and the problem will go away. See image below;

 

[BlueEye]

Very interesting stuff Sterling (for a geek like me anyways). I'm going to look into this extensively and also get some feedback from Roy, Art, T.J., etc. on the idea behind it all.

 

Thank you for the detailed post -

Chad