@Cinder

@Cinder

Search is fixed. I've been unavailable for the past two weeks dealing with some personal stuff, so after getting the server back online I hadn't been able to check in, really. Like Robo said, after service and server restarts the search service doesn't always come back up.

@Foolio:

The official word will have to come from bren, but I understand we've been getting rather inundated with nonsensical bot-generated DMCA requests; too many to manually review in the short windows provided to take the content down. In many cases the claims are extremely vague and there isn't even any content to take down. Our host does not vet these requests whatsoever for legitimacy. We are still discussing the best way to move forward.

Yeah, over the past year or so we've had a handful of outages, but of them only two have I think have been due to technical issues. Disk space once, and a service hang once. The rest were all DMCA requests. I've gone back and forth with Comeso, the primary complainant, for a while now and it seems we are the villains from their perspective because, "unlike other forums", we have links to manga sites in our manga/anime threads. These are pretty flimsy DMCA claims, but for whatever reason we are on the radar and keep getting takedown requests. We're only given ~48 hours to address them and respond back before we are taken offline, at which point it's much more difficult to resolve the issue.

Server was hung. It always picks the worst times. I'm on vacation right now so it took a minute for me to be able to load up from some free wifi but things are back online.

Themes are a ton of work to put together. I used to have a development copy of the server, but I just don't have time for that anymore. It'd require some serious volunteer efforts. I don't recall stalling on a theme though; I know we had discussed a few and had Photoshop examples but nothing was in progress.

I made everyone wait again, sorry. I can't log into the server while I'm connected to my corporate VPN, and I've been on that pretty much all day every day lately. I just took a few to disconnect and fix the search though, special thanks to Robo and Foolio for patiently reminding me (frequently).

@joekido:

Maybe you should find someone who can do your job when your busy so you don't have to have so much burden.

I'm not necessarily the only one with access to the server, but in this case it was tied to billing and ownership over the server so the buck has to stop somewhere, right?

@Mr.:

Are there precautions we should take to make sure we don't post another picture or anything that could get this site another dmca?

Not really, no. Don't worry about it.

@One:

Can I donate to this forum? I've missed it the last weeks although I'm not a regular user.

Yep, the link is on the top nav bar: http://forums.arlongpark.net/misc.php?do=donate

I'm still arguing with our hosting site to get refunded for the last 30 days at least. They are insisting we "copied an infringing image onto our servers" and I've literally provided them a screenshot of the HTML code that shows the image is not hosted on our site so there's nothing to remove. It's copyright overreach so I'm filing a DMCA counter notice and also notified the complainant. To my knowledge copyright protection over URL's is a gray area, but it's only really enforceable when the URL itself is knowingly pointing at infringing content (IE: intentionally providing links to pirated music or video); in our case the link was to licensed content– we were basically advertising for the seller, yet they filed a DMCA.

We were given three days to correct the reported content before services were shut down, and I was late to see the email amidst work priorities. As of the beginning of March, in anticipation and then reaction to COVID/Coronavirus stuff, me and a few other engineers at work were building out a solution to allow ~1500 people at our offices to work remotely. We're also in the middle of a merger with another org, so it's been a busy month, otherwise I could have removed the "infringing content" much quicker and had us back online much sooner.

It was literally a URL to some eCommerce site that was selling the painting.

@Darkstorm:

Been obvious for a long time, but yeah, you win

I win.

Site's back up. Sorry for the delay, I've been at a conference for work and am sick so I've been crashing immediately after. Robo looped me in though, so you can stop hitting F5 now.