Wedge

As I have already said in a few places before, I don't think we will need to use any of the spammers databases (Project Honey Pot, Stop Forum Spam, Bot Scout, etc etc) here in Wedge.

Check inside the Features list inside the category "Security": http://wedge.org/pub/feats/security/

The security measures already build inside the core of Wedge by Arantor are so strong that I doubt very much any spammer will be able to pass them.

Of course I cannot be 100 % sure about it until we make a live test, so the first thing I will do, as soon as we get a first alpha version of Wedge ready for testing, will be to do a test forum and advertise it in a few spammers sites I know so I will get hundreds (or thousands) of spam-bots coming every day to that test forum trying to get into it.

I will create there a log system to be able to see what they manage to do and what they don't and then I will decide if (as I suspect) the security measures here are enough or if I need to import any of my anti-spam mods from SMF to here.

Of course we all know the spammers are always inventing new bots and looking for new ways of getting to us, so we will need to be also inventing new things as well. The good thing about it is there are already enough brilliant minds here thinking about all the possible problems we may find, so I think we are OK.  :eheh:

After saying that, you all know I enjoy very much doing plug-ins and mods and I will like to learn how to build good ones for Wedge, so I may anyway port mod httpBL for Wedge even if I decide we don't really need it just as a practice exercise to see more clear how Wedge plug-ins work.

We will see.  :eheh:

This conversation started in SMF here (more or less):

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=366399.msg3071573#msg3071573

We went a little off-topic there and ended up talking between virtual_al and me about the differences between Wedge and SMF and the bad impression on first sight he has got of some things here.

I can understand exactly why he got that first impression, being somebody pretty new to SMF that had never heard about Wedge and all the things that happened in SMF in the last few years.

I think the topic is really important and I wouldn't like to leave it like that. I feel we need to analyse it thoroughly for 2 reasons:

1.- To change virtual_al's first impression.

2.- To see if we need to change anything in the way we are presenting ourselves to the people that have never heard of us before and/or any of the problems we may have had with SMF in the past.

Of course I didn't feel we should continue talking about this topic there inside SMF (I don't want any more kind PMs asking me to stop promoting competitors) so I asked virtual_al to open an account here and copy/paste all his opinions in a new topic so we could continue the conversation here.

Of course, as he just pointed out in a PM, he cannot do that:I see your point virtual_al. You are right, it won't be polite.

I could just continue the conversation via PMs but, as I said before, I feel the topic is important, so I have opened it myself so we all can talk about it.

Let me see some of the points I would like to answer:That was here already when I joined last December.

In that time we didn't had yet a full List of Features. Most of the things were very much un-organized and to find out anything you had to search a lot through the site, reading posts here and there.

Just now there is a full List of Features. 108 features all in all, including 46 major additions. They're sorted by category here:

http://wedge.org/pub/feats/

They are well explained, with the status of each one and with the possibility to add a comment to any one of them to ask for any more explanation if needed.

I think somebody should change that part of the FAQs to add there the link to the List of Features.I don't really understand how you got that impression. Of course I cannot see the FAQs with "fresh" eyes as I already know where everything is coming from, but if that's the first impression somebody new gets when reading the FAQs, I think somebody should re-write them.

For example, when it says we plan to do updates very often it's comparing it with the ridiculous speed of the updates in SMF. I don't even remember how many years ago they started to do SMF 2.0, but it definitely was not a few months ago, but a few years ago. And take a look at the amount of bugs sorted every month by the SMF team comparing it with the amount of bugs Nao and Arantor sort every month. (And don't forget to take a look at the list of bugs they were planning to sort in SMF 2.0 but they have postponed to sort them later because if not they would have need to wait another couple of years, so at the end they have released 2.0 final with a lot of bugs inside it).

So for me I get the impression it is saying something like "If you are the kind of guy who doesn't give a f**k if your software is always up-to-date and free of bugs or not, Wedge is not for you".

In my day-to-day work I see hundreds of computers with all kind of systems and configurations. Most of the computers they bring me is because they are not working properly and they want me to sort them. And the worst ones are always the computers where the owner never update the software.

So if you are a guy using XP service pack 1 (when SP3 has been out for years and sort a lot of important security bugs) still using Internet Explorer 6 (when IE9 has been out already for a while with a lot of bugs sorted and there are also better browsers as Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc) with an antivirus out of date, etc, etc, don't come asking me for a miracle. I can update your computer, clean all the viruses, sort all the problems and leave your computer working properly, but if you don't change your mentality and update yourself the software more often (or bring me the computer once a month so I do it for you) you will have the same problems again after a few months.

It's the same with forums.

I saw last week a guy using SMF 1.1.6 because that's the version that was just out when he started the forum and has never bother to update it. Definitely Wedge is not at all for that kind of guy.

But you are not like that. In fact this conversation started just the next day after SMF released 2.0 final version and 1.1.14 because you were wondering if you should upgrade from 1.1.13 to 1.1.14 or to 2.0 and if all the mods you have are or not compatibles with those versions.

That's the kind of spirit we are expecting here.

And BTW, I would like to comment some more in this paragraph:The way Wedge started maybe that was true in a sense. At least when I joined last December we were very few of us and most of us geeks more or less fed-up with the way they were doing things in SMF and willing to find software that really will have all the kind of features we are expecting from this kind of software, but the way I see Wedge just now, it's not only for geeks.

In fact the latest things Arantor is working on will make very easy to update plug-ins (we call the mods here plug-ins for reasons that doesn't matter just now) or even to update the core of the forum without needing to worry about un-installing and re-installing plug-ins (as you need to do in SMF) or the amount of plug-ins you have.

Plug-ins will be compatible with almost any version of Wedge, so the plug-ins won't need to be updated every time there is a small change in the core of the software (as they need in SMF).

All the updates and plug-in installs will be fully automatic and you won't need to edit manually one single line of code (as you need to do so often in SMF) even if you are not using the default Theme.

Etc, etc, so noobs with no idea about coding will be able to update the core and install plug-ins with just a click.

Being like that, if upgrading your forum only takes you a few seconds and doesn't gives you any hassle at all I don't think you will mind if there is a new version of the software once a month.  :eheh:

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I could still answer a few more things, but maybe would be better to shut up for a while and see what the rest of the people here thinks about it.

And BTW, as you are new here you may not know this:

Any opinion expressed here by Arantor or Neo can be considered (almost always) as the official Wedge opinion, while any other one's opinion (as mine for example) are normally just personal opinions (with some few punctual exceptions).

Here is a tutorial on how to recover data using Ubuntu:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery

As you can see, they also recommend (among other programs) TestDisk.

Have you tried to recover any of the "gibberish" files using it?

As I said yesterday, a customer gave me last year a camara card (SSD formatted as FAT16 IIRC) that had been very badly damaged, asking me to do my best to recover anything from there.

All the programs that I tried gave me only a collection of binary gibberish data, not recognisable as any known file format.

Even Ontrack DataRecovery (that had done wonders for me in the past) couldn't get any sense about the data inside the card. Only saw gibberish as well.

That was when I started googleing to see how to do it with Ubuntu (up to 2 years ago I had used only windows and had no idea about how to use any linux system) and found out TestDisk.

That program not only recovered all the pictures my customer had inside the card. It even recovered old pictures he had no idea who had done (apparently they were done before he had formatted the card the first time years ago).

Since then I always use TestDisk first when a customer brings me a hard disk with lost partitions / files.

I know. I was trying to put more emphasis on the idea that for me Wedge is not a competitor of SMF, the same as for example Windows 7 is not a competitor of Windows 98. Just a lot better software that started from the same point.

The way you were involved with SMF and the way they treated you is completely different to the way I have been involved or have been treated.

I suppose if I had ever been so committed myself to work for the community and they had done to me half of the things they did to you I would be VERY VERY angry, but they couldn't really tell me anything wrong as I have never been a part of the team there (apart from the translation team).Completely agree. And that's another reason for me to keep my account there.

After I wrote the anti-spam mods I feel a kind of obligation with the people using them. Most of them (99% at least) are normal users with no relation at all with the SMF directive. It's not their fault if I don't agree with the directive. They are just people with spammers in their forums who trusted me to help them fight the spammers.

I will love to tell all of them "You want a forum free of spammers: Forget SMF and upgrade to Wedge" but I cannot do that yet. Maybe after Wedge is ready my account in SMF will be no use for me any longer, but in the mean time I need it to sort bugs in those mods and to answer the people with problems in the support topics.

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[side note]
You may have noticed I have been using the word "upgrade" in the last week every time I talk about changing from SMF to Wedge. It implies the idea that Wedge is not a competitor of SMF, but a superior version of the same codebase.
[/side note]

I don't see any point deleting my account there. Even if I don't use it too often, that will give me the chance to express my opinion if I want to.

For example, I moved from Mambo to Joomla in 2006 and stopped using Joomla too a couple of years later (when they had problems with the bridge between Joomla and SMF) but I still have my accounts there.

I don't use them too much now-a-days, but if I ever want to say something there I can do it.

The problem is Nao has never used Linux before (AFAIK) so I don't think it's going to be easy for him to use an Ubuntu live CD to recover data.

I definitely would suggest you to try with TestDisk as somebody else already said.

I have TestDisk installed in my Linux partition and it has been brilliant to recover data from all kind of different places (windows and linux partitions, etc. I even recovered with it data from a camera card that was really badly damaged).

And the good thing about TestDisk is that you don't need to have Linux installed. You can try it almost with anything.

I even saw once a stand alone CD with only TestDisk in it (done in DOS I think). Don't remember where it was, but suppose you can find it with Google.

In my main production servers:

PHP 5.2.17
MySql 5.0.67

But I have the choice to use other versions in subfolders if needed (included PHP 5.3)