Welcome / About This Forum

[Tad Eareckson]

Fawkes and gasdive...

Belated welcome. Real happy to see you over here.

And apologies to people with whom I've gotten behind on correspondence - but I've been pretty snowed lately.

Everybody...

It appears that we're starting to get our membership list a bit swollen with people who have no interest in gliders and probably aren't even people. Barring objections from Zack I'm probably gonna take the following:

absavknv
candy236
leddy953
sameera56tt
sybil346
Charles remo
carla775

names off the roll unless I get some indication that they're here for legitimate purposes.

Zack,

Is there some switch you can throw to make this forum a little less spammer friendly?

[Zack C]

Zack,

Is there some switch you can throw to make this forum a little less spammer friendly?

I've now made it so that new registrants will not be able to create a signature until they've posted five times. I've also switched the CAPTCHA plugin to something more difficult to crack.

We have the option of requiring administrators to activate new accounts, but I'd rather leave that until we've exhausted other measures.

Zack

[Tad Eareckson]

US Hawks - http://www.ushawks.org - has lately been crippled by and is currently out of commission as a consequence of denial of service attacking, undoubtedly engineered by The Dark Lord of The World's Largest and Friendliest Hang Gliding Community (who, along with his Oz Report fraternal twin, has been in serious need of a light saber inserted in his ass and pushed out of his throat, slowly, since about a half hour after his birth - or whatever it was that brought him onto the surface of this planet).

Kite Strings IS growing - albeit very slowly - and I predict that when it achieves enough critical mass to become visible on the radar screen it will suffer the same treatment and fate. So use and enjoy the so far unrestricted ('cept for spammers) First Amendment freedoms we have here while it lasts.

And if anybody here has a friend in the FBI who owes him a favor...

[Tad Eareckson]

I'm gonna deactivate the following non kite looking folk from the registered list to reduce the clutter.

absavknv
candy236
leddy953
sameera56tt
sybil346
carla775

A deactivated person ain't a banned person and can light back up with the password and original e-mail address - and I have recorded the original e-mail addresses so I can help if there are any actual kite or legitimately interested folk who get squelched.

P.S. And, of course, I now realize that all the information sticks around and is accessible by an Administrator anyway.

[bobk]

US Hawks - http://www.ushawks.org - has lately been crippled by and is currently out of commission

Just for the record, I looked for posts made to US Hawks during that time frame and found these:

2011/07/27
13:12
15:40
16:27
17:34
17:46
17:58
18:24
18:50
19:00
19:34
19:45
19:48
19:58
20:02
21:14

2011/07/28
09:56
10:29
10:37
10:53
11:20
12:20
12:41
15:38
18:00
20:54

2011/07/29
02:07
17:50
18:02
18:58
21:24

2011/07/30
04:51
11:52
15:29
20:55
21:08

My searching technique doesn't guarantee that I'll find every post, but I believe that's relatively accurate. I do think we were having some posting irregularities around then, but the record still shows pretty regular posting for that time frame. And the site was always up and readable even if there were some posting problems. I only say this because it's important to show that the US Hawks site has been up and running since it was founded on August 13th, 2010. I think the record is pretty clear about it.

Having said that, I don't have much doubt that there are people who would like to take down both of these sites. My point is that they haven't been successful so far.

[Tad Eareckson]

Well, I guess your site is a lot safer now, Bob. The forces of evil - USHGA, the Flight Park Mafia, Davis, Jack... - really wanted me silenced to keep their incompetence, corruption, and strings of serial killings from being exposed. And you did that for them - using the same tactics. If you can't attack and destroy the message of the whistleblower then use whatever you can to cut him to shreds personally.

Responding to a little bit from one of our recent phone conversations...

You wanted to make Hawks and Strings sharply divided entities:

the former a friendly, welcoming, thought-free zone for stupid American Family Association approved people and their kids to get together, tell each other how wonderful they are, and help to build a better hang gliding association; and

the latter a think tank where any of the tiny minority of your members capable of thinking could go on the rare occasion when he needed a short break from all the pablum to satisfy a passing urge to learn something.

This place is NOT, primarily, a THINK TANK. It's primarily a SCIENCE CLASSROOM and it handles science issues - starting from around the bottom of the grade school school level (the fewer hands you have on the handlebars the more likely you are to skin your knee (or - depending upon the circumstances - break your freaking neck)) up to the high school physics level (a one to one bridle does everything the lunatic Hewett two to one bridle does but a zillion times simpler and better) 'cause high school physics is about all I'm capable of handling and, fortunately, all we really need in this game.

The efforts here are not to come up with brilliant new ideas for equipment and procedures. Just about everything on here was well established in hang gliding in the early Seventies and the underlying principles have been solid since the Seventeenth Century.

We just need to get information out to as wide an audience as possible to help protect people from the dangerous frauds who've taken the sport over. And you just made that a lot more difficult.

[Tad Eareckson]

http://www.ushawks.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1
Hello US Hawks!!

Bill Cummings - 2011/12/16 18:12:30 UTC

HELLO!o----o----o----o
WHERE DID EVERYBODY GO?----o---o---o

Doesn't look like the scientific experiment of eliminating Tad the disemboweller and dangerous sexual predator has so far brought in quite the increase in membership and flood of participation that you had hoped it would, huh Bob?

(Toljyaso.)

[Steve Davy]

Looks like i'm stuck with using dial up. GOD this thing is slow.

[Tad Eareckson]

Not for long, I trust. That was a near seventeen year hell I hope I put forever behind me twenty-four days ago at about this hour. (Hello videos!)

[Zack C]

When I created this forum, I didn't even know if it would still be around after a year. I'm glad that not only is it still here, we've gained some valuable participants as well (even if our numbers are small).

I'm equally happy to see we're starting to get some blips on Google. For example, search for '"towing aloft"' and the first two links are to this site (even ahead of Amazon). Search for 'aerotow weak link' and we're the second.

With the site gaining visibility, and the realization that it really could become a useful resource to an audience wider than just a few people, I've decided to procure our own domain name. As you may have noticed, our URL has changed from
http://kitestrings.prophpbb.com
to
http://www.kitestrings.org
You may also just type
http://kitestrings.org
which will redirect to the 'www' site. The old name will also redirect to the new one, so existing links to our site will still work.

The new domain provides a few benefits:
1. Image. It shouldn't matter, but having our own domain just looks better. It lets people know we're serious enough about what we're doing to invest a little money and effort into it. Not only that, but having a .org instead of a .com address lets people know we're not trying to make money.
2. Permanence. Should we ever move to a different host, or choose to host the board ourselves, all we'll need is a database backup from ProphpBB and we'll be able to have the site running with the same address (so external links to our site will still work and our search engine rankings won't be affected).
3. Convenience. The new domain is easier to type, easier to remember, and easier to give out.

Any links you create to this site should use the new name instead of the old one. Links using the old one will still work as long as we're with ProphpBB, but if we ever move, they'll break.

I'm also looking to get rid of the ads on the site as they don't help our image either and are really annoying.

Zack