Erik

OFF is still here, they do have a presence here. Feel free to post here and enjoy. As for the registration problems you may have to contact the board administrators over there directly to resolve it. Take care and thanks for being a valued part of our community.

The file was uploaded into a parent category that shouldn't have been accepting file submissions but it was. The category was changed and the file moved so everything should be ok now. Thanks for pointing that out. E

I really hope that is not what anyone is reading into this discussion or taking from it. From my perspective I can try to explain why any of this is important to me and more importantly the community and our business decisions. I offered an explanation to the OFF Community and an apology because my personal life in May lapped over to the business affairs of OFF and affected the community here. My apology also included an explanation of what happened so you all knew why, what, and how those decisions came to be and that like all of you I don't take them lightly. In fact us being down for any period of time or having any part of our community moving or changing their traffic patterns is critically important to me. I wanted to make sure you all knew just how important which is why I responded to the thread here in hopes of doing just that while providing all of you some direct contact and discussion. That said I think we've done a great job at covering the original topic started here. We've also been able to get the information delivered to the community which I needed to do and greatly appreciate. If some of my inner "protective instincts" for the CA community and the OFF community came through during any of that I apologize but I also hope it is understandable. I'm sure that everyone understands that my decisions and responsibilities, like OBD and Winder, focus on the business aspects and side of things here. The community, the software, the hardware, the upkeep, etc here all have real costs associated to them. If my actions or any action that happens here causes an impact to our revenue or ability to generate that revenue that's a problem as it directly impacts what and how we are able to provide to the entire community which OFF is part of. Simply put you're all an important part and factor of what keeps us open for business and providing what we do. I do not take that lightly nor do I want to be part of casually dismissing it away. The entire community here is far too important to me not to understand and appreciate what we all do for each other here. For the record I'm deeply grateful for Doug and SIMHQ they are a terrific asset to this community and you'll never see me in a debate or discussion that puts us on opposite ends. I hope that helps aid in an understanding and takes us completely away from a site versus site call to arms or "show of loyalty" that I believe was referred to. All my best; Erik

Have you ever received a box at your front door that you're totally not expecting? Yesterday FedEx did just that. Almost 6 months ago I ordered a monitor from a place in Los Angeles. When my order arrived it was damaged by the shipper so I put in a claim, replaced the monitor locally at BestBuy, and forgot about it. Yesterday the replacement equipment showed up that I don't really need. I'm happier with the replacement monitor than I am with the original order. So I have this new in the box, never opened, paper weight sitting in my office. You can take a look at what arrived yesterday here: ASUS VW246H Glossy Black 24" 2ms(GTG) HDMI Widescreen LCD Monitor 300 cd/m2 ASCR 20000:1 (1000:1) Built-in Speakers I'm wondering if we should just have a contest or some type of community involvement activity that I can gift this off to the winner? What do you guys think and what kind of contest / activity do you think I should offer? Let me know if you are interested in something like this. Could be fun to see what you guys come up with.

I'm thinking we'll get this underway maybe tomorrow or Tuesday. I'll post here and in an official thread when we're ready to rock and roll. Thank you everyone this should be fun. Erik

Hmmmm now there's something to think about.

I like it.

The one with the Waldo Fire burning in the background is an image for posterity. Nicely done. ** Thank you Major Lee for catching my typo. Posterity is definitely what I meant.

Thank you all for the warm and well wishes. I beyond anyone am happy that my outcome has been so positive. There is so much more to the story that one day I only hope I'm able to share with everyone. Being in the hospital for so long is a sure fire way to have great experiences or at least funny ones. I have to say that without a doubt I know why Gabriel Giffords did so well after her event. Like her I was treated in the same facility however not necessarily by the same staff or doctors. I can't say enough for the facility and it's ever so capable care. Without them I wouldn't be here today and without their diligence I wouldn't be able to make the claims of besting any odds I have been able to make. I owe them entirely for everything. Here's looking toward our future and the many sunsets yet to come. We're here to have fun and enjoy the company of others and I will continue to make sure that is exactly what we're able to do. If you haven't yet seen the post in the general forum > pub titled "What now?" you should give it a read. As always all my best to everyone it's been an absolute pleasure having you all around. Erik

I'd want something that everyone can take part in no matter if they are a member or modder. There are a great group of people here and I for one think we can have fun with this while rewarding our community a little. I'll continue to take suggestions and ideas to see what we can come up with then we'll run with an idea and make some fun of it. Thanks so far for everything. Erik

There has been some news about the take over of name servers across the internet. I think everyone should take a moment and review the information here: http://www.dcwg.org/detect/ It can never hurt and it only takes a second to read about it and check your setup. http://www.dcwg.org/detect/

Everyone - I'm horrified after reading this. I owe you all an explanation and hopefully a reason to stay not to go. I want everyone to know my official position is to have the entire membership of OFF to remain here, regardless of any changes or "official" forum. To me this is the home for OFF and always will be. I'm horrified that my personal life invaded the OFF community, it's members and collectively community decisions. That said here is the back story. From the site stand point one of the many things I'm responsible for is hardware. Sometime back in January I started planning to upgrade our storage capacity namely hard drive storage. Just like your machines at home one of the definitive hard limits is how much we can physically store and with a site like this where files and content are added almost every second of the day our storage needs continue to grow. I monitor our equipment daily and plan for these variables it's part of what I do and the decisions are mine. The way our equipment works adding physical hard drive space isn't a matter of slapping in a new drive and moving on. We have the responsibility of redundancy, accessibility for speed, and long term storage. Hence any changes to our RAID configuration takes planning and poise. The above in mind I planned the upgrade for May based on my work load and schedule. I started all the backups and moving of crucial data to my home work stations and had our data center fire up a new machine for our migration. The tentative schedule was to have everything moved by the 10th of May and the new machine was scheduled with the data center to go live then. I asked for the DNS migration to go into effect based on my schedule of how long it should take and where I was in the process and moved on. This isn't the first time I've done this and most of the time migrations and changes go off with little to no problems and are often something you guys ever notice. On May 6th sometime near the 11:00 PM hour local time I arrived at the University Medical Center Emergency Room. Twenty minutes later I was in cardiac arrest from a pulmonary embolism that blocked the circulation to and exchange of oxygen with my lungs. I was officially in cardiac arrest for 45 minutes and coded 4 times while the great folks in the emergency department worked on me. During this episode of events I was iced and incubated into a medically induced coma followed by life support on ECMO (Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation). I remained on ECMO for two weeks and drug induced in a coma while my body healed. ECMO is usually reserved for younger people and was a last ditch effort in saving my life. So there I was and I have no memory of any of it. Waking up happened somewhere in May. My family was told that I had a 20% chance of surviving what happened to me and a less than 5% chance that I'd be a functioning adult afterwards. The fear was that due to the extreme distress I underwent that I'd have a mental or physical handicap as a result of the prolonged arrest, lack of oxygen, subsequent incubation, or transfer to ECMO. Regardless of any of this my life and what was happening at CombatACE continued forward. I didn't and couldn't communicate with the data center to let them know to stop what I had already started. My family who was in preservation mode didn't know to call someone about it and nobody had access to my email account which for most people are private anyway. Even if they had known what was going on with CombatACE there is nothing they could have done. We didn't go offline over something simple. Someone would have had to have known that I requested our DNS migration already and they simply wouldn't have known that. When the DNS request finally went into effect it pointed our domain to equipment that was essentially new and empty. We were officially offline at that point. When I came to and started the check-sum of my life I realized that we were offline. Getting us back online was fairly simple but took my direction to get it done and once completed we were live again. Essentially at this point I haven't made our migration to new equipment but now that I'm down and recovering from the episodes of late I have the time so it is planned. As for me I'm still living and after almost two months in the hospital they've finally released me back to home so I can recover fully. Long term prognosis and results are still out but optimistic. I have defied all the statistics and if I have anything to say about it will continue to do so. I'll answer any questions you guys have site or health related. I'm responsible, the buck stops on my desk, and I dropped the ball. I hope that through all this you'll all understand and be compassionate when it comes to judging me, the professionalism and performance of CombatACE, and what happened to everyone across multiple sites and venues. It was never my plan nor my intention to leave anyone in the dark and I'm sure had anyone who knew what was happening to me would have let you all know had they've known to do so. Regardless I've made changes here locally where I keep an action plan and contact list should this type of thing happen again. At least that way someone will know and someone can communicate with you all should it happen again even if that's the very very very last thing I ever want. My sincerest and humblest of apologies. Erik

I totally forgot to mention the coffee and I never go anywhere without my towel. HAHAHAHA good fun.

I changed it yesterday and double checked the settings today. For all intensive purposes the feature should be available. Can we check this again? Thanks.

Here is a link to that -> http://combatace.com/index.php?app=core&module=usercp&tab=core&area=attachments Edit / Remove / as necessary to keep your content under the limit. You can also upload images to the Gallery with no restrictions and then link those images into your posts with no limitations on quantity or size. Erik

Yep that's it exactly. We don't accept .bmp images due to the low compression and size. Use a smaller format like gif / jpg / png etc.

Both the icon in the rich text editor to insert an image and the bulletin board code [img= ] work.

This service will be restored sometime tonight. Erik

As of right now there are not any plans to implement this request. We'll keep it in mind however. Thank You. Erik

We'll have this service restored tonight. E