OAPSO.org

Blog vs. Guestbook

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 01:47:55 GMT

Chat Room / Bulletin Board

Last year I put a “Guestbook” onto the website which is a forum for people to post any comments that they would like. The upside of this is that it is easy for visitors to the site to post items and they do not need to create an account or profile to do this. Recently the Web Host has added functionality that it would appear would allow me to create a Blog which is effectively the same thing as a guestbook. We have only had three posts to the guestbook in the last year. That said I will setup a Blog and leave it for you guys to decide if we should

A) replace the guestbook with the Blog,

B) Link to the Guestbook and the Blog or

C) leave just the guestbook.

Server with Password Protection for Chair Persons

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 10:08:20 GMT

This is something that was brought up in the meeting that I visited and it is possible. One issue is that to edit the site you have to have the correct software and 2 I have concerns that if the site is synced incorrectly there is a serious risk of bringing down the site. If I knew exactly what the Board sees as the most beneficial functionality I could research workarounds, but cannot guarantee I can develop it in a fail safe manner. Would any of the following be particularly useful?

· A shared directory where Board Members could save, view and edit documents (word, excel, powerpoint).

· Access to specific files such as the membership and certification lists so that anybody could make edits that would be reflected on the site immediately after save.

· The ability of board members to directly edit the site.

SPAM and OAPSO.org e-mail addresses

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 10:07:43 GMT

It would appear that there are “spam crawlers” on the net. What these crawlers do is go to a website, scan the entire thing and then send any e-mail addresses back to a database, it then replicates itself and follows every link on that website and does the same thing at the new sites it finds and then replicates itself again. The database of e-mail addresses is then sold by super evil spammers to companies advertising cheap drugs, penile enlargement and a host of other “useful” products and services. The evidence is pretty conclusive that a spam crawler found oapso.org about 6 weeks ago, inundating everybody with an e-mail address on the site with tons of junk mail. The options here as I see them are;

· we put up with it

· we all change our e-mail addresses and prevent this in the future by not putting our e-mail addresses online, just leaving a “contact box” similar to the one we presently have here http://www.oapso.org/feedback.htm. This could be directed to me or whomever and I could then direct the e-mail appropriately

· We can purchase what is marketed as very effective spam protection from dot easy for a price of $6.95 per month. This will protect all oapso e-mail accounts. Those persons who do not have an OAPSO e-mail account I am not certain what to say. If I create an OAPSO e-mail account for all board members and set it up to forward to your personal e-mail addresses that are currently online and we get the SPAM protection then this will offer protection against spam generated by the next spam crawler to hit OAPSO. Unfortunately once an e-mail address is in a spam database, it is there for good. SPAM protection needs to be offered on the domain that the address is linked to, ie simpatico,ca / Clarington.net etc. doteasy offers protection for the oapso.org addresses but cannot do anything for the other addresses. Let me know what to do. I can create the accounts using whatever naming convention you like, the most common ones are; first initial and last name (jgoddard) and first name “.” Last name (jason.goddard), I would then give everybody their own password and instructions on how to change it and forward it to the account of your choice.

To give you some perspective. When I was doing my MBA I had a YorkU e-mail address like every other YorkU student (about 40,000). I received dozens of real e-mails every day and got only the very occasional spam message (1 or 2 a month). The reason for this was good spam protection, supposedly similar to what doteasy is offering. The York IT services department reports that over 97% of the e-mail sent to a yorku e-mail account was identified as spam and blocked. So theses spam blockers can be very effective.