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diy solar

How about a separate EG4 subforum?

Maybe you are not following me.
The Site was hacked several months earlier and the inactive Cryptolocker software was installed while they were actively sabotaging multiple server systems for weeks. Nothing noticeable happened for months until a final command was sent.
All of the backups they made over those months were already compromised.
Keep in mind their main source of Revenue is matching contacts between Operators across the globe and adding them up towards various Career based Awards.

I don't think you understand the Kind of Money that is spent in the Ham Radio Hobby.
Here is a link to just one of the planned 2026 Dxpedition with a bigger one from that same team in 2027
https://3y0k.com/

The ARRL cannot use a 6 month old backup that does not contain contacts made by a recent $1 million dollar Expedition or even a small one that was needed by several thousand operators to complete their HR Award.
It is not a Forum where some posts can just go missing and no one really gets hurt.

They did try to reinstalling a backup, but as soon as it went online it was locked again. They called in the FBI who sent a team to investigate and they hired security specialist to go through the backups.
From what we were told after a few weeks they realized that isolating what was added or changed was not feasible, so they negotiated the 5 million down to 1 million and paid them. Even when they got it back online they realized that parts of the system were corrupted and other parts were still security compromised.
They have hired programmers to rewrite the Awards part of the system.
The ARRL has over 1.5 Billion contacts recorded and matched and 156 thousand active Radio Operators paying for the service.
The way the ransom stuff works is like this.

An archiver reads the files and then writes them out with the same file name or they add their own extension and password protects the archive.

No different than you using rar or zip to make a password protect archive. When you pay the ransom it just unarchives the files using the password the ransom people give you or they give you a program with the password embedded in it that does the unarchiving.

The backups even if the ransomware was in place are just backups of the files that are there. The files are not "infected". The archiver program if it has access to the backup files when it goes nuclear will encrypt the backups too if it can get to them. But on a true offsite setup it can't do that so that makes me think they left access to the drives by the server running the website 24/7. That's actually the norm. Dumb setup but the norm.
 
The way the ransom stuff works is like this.

An archiver reads the files and then writes them out with the same file name or they add their own extension and password protects the archive.

No different than you using rar or zip to make a password protect archive. When you pay the ransom it just unarchives the files using the password the ransom people give you or they give you a program with the password embedded in it that does the unarchiving.

The backups even if the ransomware was in place are just backups of the files that are there. The files are not "infected". The archiver program if it has access to the backup files when it goes nuclear will encrypt the backups too if it can get to them. But on a true offsite setup it can't do that so that makes me think they left access to the drives by the server running the website 24/7. That's actually the norm. Dumb setup but the norm.
This was not just about money.
The Ransomware part was just an added bonus to pay for the grunts who did this.
The ARRL makes decisions that effect very rich and influential Ham operators in many countries and also Dxpeditions that spend millions. Many people think that this was a hit designed to permanently put them out of business, the Ransomware was just a part of the overall hack that they did.
Most guys think it originated from a group if Russian Ham Operators who are frustrated over some things that went down in the league since the Ukraine war started. I don't know if that is true!

It's hard to make regular folks understand how much passion and Money is involved Ham Radio.
There are hundreds of guys who have spent well over $400K on just Antennas and equipment.
There are operators that routinely Donate $10K just to help fund a single Dxpedition
The Northern California NCDXF club alone will sometimes donate up to $400K to a single big expedition.
I highly suggest you look at the link I posted previously. That will give you an idea of how seriously this hobby is to some people.
 
Hi Will. I know there are a lot of opinions when it comes to application design, implementation, and system maintenance. I'm a solar rook but have 30+ years in enterprise web apps and data analytics. It can be impossible to pigeon hole any post, question, or topic discussion into a single category. Maintenance and ease of use can be greatly affected and it gets exponentially harder as you add more options making it hard to find anything. For this and many other reasons agree that more subforums would not be a good idea.

In my opinion a tag based system usually works best for these situations. This ranges from trivial to impossible to implement depending on your development stack and available resources but it can really help organize and group metrics for searches, reporting, and statistics. It would allow users to post to one forum (no sub forums would be necessary) and assign one or more "tags" that may fit the post. Admins should also be able to add/edit tags if the user misses or miscategorizes a post.

For example, I had a recent post asking if my proposed setup was safe and see if I was missing anything. I used the "Beginners Corner and Safety Check" subforum (I got great results by the way ;) ). Instead of deciding on a sub forum the user would select one or more tags to be added to the post such as "Beginners Corner", "Safety Check", "EG4", "Victron", "Growatt", "System Grounding", "System Design Help", "Batteries", "Solar Panels", "Inverters" "General Solar", "Non-Solar", "Software Settings", "Off Grid", "Grid Tied", "Net Metering", "System Errors/Faults" "Code/UL Questions" etc. The system could also automatically tag the post based on status (new, unanswered, trending, maybe user type or others).

Going forward, this can allow your expert users to select the tags they want to answer questions on and enable other dynamic searches. Various user metrics and data analytics can also add value for your advertisers or even enable specific advertising based on post tag.

It is a lot I know but fundamental system design can greatly reduce maintenance and improve the user experience if it is within the capabilities of your stack and developer. Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss. I feel like I owe you for all of the help you have given me in my journey so far. Good luck.
 
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Hi Will. I know there are a lot of opinions when it comes to application design, implementation, and system maintenance. I'm a solar rook but have 30+ years in enterprise web apps and data analytics. It can be impossible to pigeon hole any post, question, or topic discussion into a single category. Maintenance and ease of use can be greatly affected and it gets exponentially harder as you add more options making it hard to find anything. For this and many other reasons agree that more subforums would not be a good idea.

In my opinion a tag based system usually works best for these situations. This ranges from trivial to impossible to implement depending on your development stack and available resources but it can really help organize and group metrics for searches, reporting, and statistics. It would allow users to post to one forum (no sub forums would be necessary) and assign one or more "tags" that may fit the post. Admins should also be able to add/edit tags if the user misses or miscategorizes a post.

For example, I had a recent post asking if my proposed setup was safe and see if I was missing anything. I used the "Beginners Corner and Safety Check" subforum (I got great results by the way ;) ). Instead of deciding on a sub forum the user would select one or more tags to be added to the post such as "Beginners Corner", "Safety Check", "EG4", "Victron", "Growatt", "System Grounding", "System Design Help", "Batteries", "Solar Panels", "Inverters" "General Solar", "Non-Solar", "Software Settings", "Off Grid", "Grid Tied", "Net Metering", "System Errors/Faults" "Code/UL Questions" etc. The system could also automatically tag the post based on status (new, unanswered, trending, maybe user type or others).

Going forward, this can allow your expert users to select the tags they want to answer questions on and enable other dynamic searches. Various user metrics and data analytics can also add value for your advertisers or even enable specific advertising based on post tag.

It is a lot I know but fundamental system design can greatly reduce maintenance and improve the user experience if it is within the capabilities of your stack and developer. Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss. I feel like I owe you for all of the help you have given me in my journey so far. Good luck.
This sounds very useful. @Will Prowse
But it might make this a walled garden.
 
Hi Will. I know there are a lot of opinions when it comes to application design, implementation, and system maintenance. I'm a solar rook but have 30+ years in enterprise web apps and data analytics. It can be impossible to pigeon hole any post, question, or topic discussion into a single category. Maintenance and ease of use can be greatly affected and it gets exponentially harder as you add more options making it hard to find anything. For this and many other reasons agree that more subforums would not be a good idea.

In my opinion a tag based system usually works best for these situations. This ranges from trivial to impossible to implement depending on your development stack and available resources but it can really help organize and group metrics for searches, reporting, and statistics. It would allow users to post to one forum (no sub forums would be necessary) and assign one or more "tags" that may fit the post. Admins should also be able to add/edit tags if the user misses or miscategorizes a post.

For example, I had a recent post asking if my proposed setup was safe and see if I was missing anything. I used the "Beginners Corner and Safety Check" subforum (I got great results by the way ;) ). Instead of deciding on a sub forum the user would select one or more tags to be added to the post such as "Beginners Corner", "Safety Check", "EG4", "Victron", "Growatt", "System Grounding", "System Design Help", "Batteries", "Solar Panels", "Inverters" "General Solar", "Non-Solar", "Software Settings", "Off Grid", "Grid Tied", "Net Metering", "System Errors/Faults" "Code/UL Questions" etc. The system could also automatically tag the post based on status (new, unanswered, trending, maybe user type or others).

Going forward, this can allow your expert users to select the tags they want to answer questions on and enable other dynamic searches. Various user metrics and data analytics can also add value for your advertisers or even enable specific advertising based on post tag.

It is a lot I know but fundamental system design can greatly reduce maintenance and improve the user experience if it is within the capabilities of your stack and developer. Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss. I feel like I owe you for all of the help you have given me in my journey so far. Good luck.
Not possible. The forum software is not setup that way and to protect it from exploits as much as possible those kinds of changes won't be made since regular updates would erase the changes.
 
Just went through the thread and they didn't break any rules. No price, links, deals or promotion. Just mentioning the product. It's a good discussion too. Geez this is a pain lol
What?
You don't even have to read the thread. It's in the posted link to the thread.

"Introducing the new 12kPV from EG4. Below you can find a link to our website detailing this new product"

How is this not advertising or promotional?
 
What?
You don't even have to read the thread. It's in the posted link to the thread.

"Introducing the new 12kPV from EG4. Below you can find a link to our website detailing this new product"

How is this not advertising or promotional?
They are smart enough to squeeze through advertising loop holes but struggle with their inverter software.

90% advertising and almost 8% engineering. I'm not sure where the other 2% goes, maybe they have a free soda machine at the office.
 
What?
You don't even have to read the thread. It's in the posted link to the thread.

"Introducing the new 12kPV from EG4. Below you can find a link to our website detailing this new product"

How is this not advertising or promotional?
Looks like a moderator must have deleted presumably a direct link to the product on the eg4 website soon after that thread was started. And given eg4 doesn't sell direct and has links to its distributors...walking the fine line Will defined.

Screenshot_20250119_074938_Chrome.jpg
 
Looks like a moderator must have deleted presumably a direct link to the product on the eg4 website soon after that thread was started. And given eg4 doesn't sell direct and has links to its distributors...walking the fine line Will defined.

View attachment 271230
Even if the link was removed, it's still advertising.
But like I said before. They seem to have a different set of rules, from other vendors.
 
Even if the link was removed, it's still advertising.
But like I said before. They seem to have a different set of rules, from other vendors.
No the rule is no links, deals or prices can be mentioned. This thread did get reported and we gutted it. They don't have a different set of rules, I want other companies to post more and I can't find a way to do it. They always respond for a few days then leave. Look at sol ark. I tell the new companies that they can post like EG4 and what the rules are and they always disappear. I want the companies here but I don't want them posting links or mentioning prices or deals. Is that pretty fair or no?
 
Looks like a moderator must have deleted presumably a direct link to the product on the eg4 website soon after that thread was started. And given eg4 doesn't sell direct and has links to its distributors...walking the fine line Will defined.

View attachment 271230
Yes this one was reported so we gutted the post entirely. I said it has to be informational and that's it. No links, deals or prices. Trying to think of a way to have all companies do this.
 
What usually happens for new products is someone else will post a thread about the product regardless. Like the 2000 reply thread on ecoworthy server rack batteries. Is that promotion? Some forum members like the battery. How do I know if a person is working for ecoworthy. I set the rules so that any company or individual can still discuss these products without directing people off the site or incentivized with a deal or price. Trying to find a compromise here. It's hard to manage this stuff. If you have a better way, let me know @timselectric
 
If anyone wants to create solid definition of promotion that still allows people to discuss products, including companies and individuals, let me know. This is a tough thing to figure out. Seems simple but I want the companies posting about their products in an informational way.
 
What usually happens for new products is someone else will post a thread about the product regardless. Like the 2000 reply thread on ecoworthy server rack batteries. Is that promotion? Some forum members like the battery. How do I know if a person is working for ecoworthy. I set the rules so that any company or individual can still discuss these products without directing people off the site or incentivized with a deal or price. Trying to find a compromise here. It's hard to manage this stuff. If you have a better way, let me know @timselectric
I don't really care what rules are set, as long as it's clear and everyone is held to them.
A representative answering questions is a great resource.
But a vendor announcing new products is purely advertising.
 
If anyone wants to create solid definition of promotion that still allows people to discuss products, including companies and individuals, let me know. This is a tough thing to figure out. Seems simple but I want the companies posting about their products in an informational way.
Model it after what companies typically put out as a "press release" for product announcements. Looks like a news story, gets the word out that the device exists, etc. but usually contains no sales info.

<EDIT> links to things like data sheets or manuals seems like it should be acceptable here in the context of a product release.
 

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