This page is a concise set of instructions for understanding and getting the most out of the new Computer Consultants Forum at http://www.computerconsultantsforum.com/forum.
The contents of this forum were previously found at http://openitforum.yuku.com, which was founded in September, 2002. The contents of that board were reformatted and imported to this new community at the end of February, 2010.
There were multiple reasons for the move:
If any of these points sound like outright jabs at Yuku, then so be it. There is so much that Yuku should improve that it never has even after repeated requests. The lack of a consistently working text search function alone indicates a lack of mature professionals at that provider who value content.
ComputerConsultantsForum.com is an online community of mature IT and computer industry professionals that is hosted and moderated by a private party. Volunteers among the community members have moderation ability.
The board software is Simple Machines Forum version 1.1.11, which is PHP and MySql based. The web host is currently http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net.
Registration is the process of identifying yourself to the forum as a user known by a name.
In order to register as a user, or to change your password from the password assigned to you by the migration process, you must have a working email account. If you have privacy concerns about using your primary email address, create a free email account with Google Gmail or similar email provider.
Currently, registration is by manual approval. This means that it may take up to a few hours. This is only because SPAM registrations and postings are rampant without a manual approval process. When a working plugin that automates this process is identified and installed, we will go to unattended registration.
Your password is never stored as-is (as its actual data) in our database. A hashed value corresponding to your password is stored by the board software, and is salted with your user name, instead.
Most approvals of new user registrarions will be "automatic" in the sense that we aren't currently interested in running anyone through a gauntlet of questions or qualifications. In the event that someone is banned for abuse, we will cross check a new user registration against the last known IP addresses of the abusing and banned previous users.
All registrations that do not appear to have a real person's name or email address are cross checked against the list at http://www.stopforumspam.com and those that match the list will be silently removed.
You are a "registered" user, or Member in SMF terminology, if you are logged in.
You are an "unregistered" user or "Guest" in SMF's terminology if you are not logged in.
Search engines like Google that spider web sites for later retrieval are never registered on SMF. They always visit the board as a Guest. So whatever Google sees is limited to whatever an unregistered user can see.
Some boards (sections) in the forum are only visible to Members and among those boards a few are limited to specific categories of users. Some profile information is only visible to Members and not to Guests.
Every member account on this site has member profile information. Some of the information is visible and some isn't. Here is exactly how public visibility of your profile works:
Your profile information is controlled by you. To do so, log in, and click the menu item named "Profile". In the next page, look under the heading "Modify Profile". The items "Account Related Settings" and "Forum Profile Information" will take you to pages where you can edit all of your profile settings.
With respect to visibility controls, you can control the visibility of the following items to other board users:
As mentioned above, the password that you set for your account here is hashed, not stored verbatim. (what is hashing? You're supposed to be in IT if you're here, bub - look it up. A hash is a one way "code" for a piece of data that is not reversible back to the original data. )
Note that you can assume that all administrators (including the board owner) and all moderators can see all of your profile information, including all profile items, and your IP addresses that activity was last seen at. If you are paranoid, again, you can use a dedicated email address from a free provider for this profile item.
All user names that were used for posting messages on the old Yuku based board have been reserved as user names on this new board.
So, any user name that was used on the old board is not available for use as a new account name here.
However, a way has been created to allow users of the old board to have their old user name here. This allows these users to "reclaim" and edit their posts that were transferred here.
Here is exactly how this works. At the time that this new board was created, each user on the old board was sent (and should have received) a Yuku private message that contained a password that was created for them so that they could log in to this new board under their old user name.
Since you need to log in to Yuku under your legacy user name, you are able to retrieve this message meant for you to reclaim your identity, and thereby log in as "yourself" on this new board.
We have gotten reports that quite a few users did not receive this message at all, probably due to Yuku dropping the messages. If you did not receive such a message and you wish to reclaim your old user ID on this board, email us here at computerconsultantsforum@gmail.com and request a new message.
The titles that appear above the name of the member in message board postings are as follows.
The member types ranging from "Never Post" through "Wise Sage" are strictly for amusement to indicate who has spent too much time posting here.
Trusted Members are a special category that is individually assigned to some users. They have visibility into boards (sections) that other categories of members do not. These members are, indeed, "trusted" because their past actions indicate that they are likely to use certain confidential areas of the forum responsibly.
Lastly, we have Moderators and Administrators.
We have basically three kinds of sections:
There are actually several private sections: