After years of being left in a bit of a disused mess and left to fall into the swamp, I’m taking steps to probably completely waste my time putting this old website back into use.
A mix of technology glitches, spammers, advances in technology + website requirements mean’t that the old websites ended up buggered.
The original forum created after the dispute with the official website many years ago is still sort of running after being first install back on 26th January 2002.
It’s closed to new members, but still around for the old farts who remember it to look back at. Mostly closed because it kept getting swamped with spammers, and it was an older forum with no protection against that sort of thing.
The follow-up 2nd forum I installed on 27th January 2009 is also running, but closed(ish) to new registrations after the improved spam protection I installed it for proved to be a fat lot of help at protecting against spammers.
Some years later I made a new front end for the website with my usual old software, and put it on a new domain I’ve recently retired to try save money.
I haven’t really been able to do crap with that for the last 5 years or so because the Seagate hard drive I had it saved to had a big failure and lost me a s**tload of data I still haven’t been able to afford to pay to get recovered.
Then a couple of years after that Google started insisting on the use of Responsive HTML web design, followed not long after that by an insistance on using some thing called AMP.
I never really got round to doing anything about the website during that time for various reasons.
That incarnation also had a 3rd attempt at renewing things with a new forum that nobody used after Melly lured away all the members from the earlier 2 forums.
That new forum had supposedly even better spam protection features, and after the domain name retirement and reversion to being part of the original JDALTPOL domain can be found HERE.
Now it’s 17th February 2020, and here I am seeing what I can do to fix things and restore order.
I might whack-up a 4th attempt at a new messageboard shortly when I’ve got everything else put together.