ausmicro.com Forums Recovered!

ausmicro.com Forums are back online!

Its far from perfect but the content of the forum up to May 2012 has been recovered!

http://www.ausmicro.com/forums

Q&A
  1. Why May 2012? I chose this date becuase it was the last completely clean backup of the Forum I have.  This was made after the last restoration and the removal of spammers etc.  While a few posts were added during 2012 & 2013 many were destroyed by the last hack.
  2. This isn’t vBulletin No, it’s not.  vBulletin was a great forum code and kept ausmicro.com running well for years BUT it was also a nightmare.  vBulletin was expensive, prone to being hacked every week and required many hours of maintenance.  This “new” setup is zero cost for the base code, has a lot of single-click update/patch functionality and is a lot leaner.
  3. So what did we lose? A lot.  BBPress (this new forum) couldn’t import things like Private Messages, Attachments or Avatars etc.  I still have the old attachment files and there may be a way of re-inserting them in here somehow – but I’ll have to work something out.  
  4. What next? Honestly I don’t know.  I wanted to bring the forums back – I’ve always said I’d do my best to keep things online.  I also know that spending 3-4 days of constant coding effort every couple of months to keep vBulletin working was not possible.  I contrast I run a few WordPress based sites and spend about an hour a week clicking the “update” button for patches and stuff.

 

Recovering your User ID

I’ve imported and created everyones user ID as they had it in the old Forum.  This new one is a lot “simpler”, but you’ll still need to update your Profile and Password to get in.

To do this just look for a Login Page and then try the “Lost Password” trick.  It requires your e-mail address to send a password too, so if you’ve changed that you’ll need to send me a message.

 

The ausmicro.com Status Update!

You’ve hit this page because it’s now where the domain http://ausmicro.com points.

This isn’t an error, the domain hasn’t been stolen and squatted on, instead you have hit the resting place of a site that was a massive part of my life.

ausmicro.com was the product of an idea shared with a good friend, it became a community, and in many ways defined who I was. Equally as importantly it put food on my table and gave me the means to do things I never would have achieved otherwise.

ausmicro_logo_with_car

All that’s gone now, the recent history where my personal issues took away the (massive) amount of time I had invested, some fraudsters who abused PayPals Buyer Protection to steal hundreds of dollars in both cash and merchandise and lastly the loss of the domain name to squatters.

In 2012 I spent a bucket of cash to get back the domain, power up the site and get back online – but by then the continual security updating that vBulletin needed, the continued vigilance against spammers not to mention the mammoth task of trying to rebuild the community was beyond me. In early 2014 yet another vBulletin security hole led to the site being defaced and once again the guys at http://stormhosts.com stepped in and did what needed to be done to protect the backend of the servers and the site has been down since.

Sorry everyone, but it’s not coming back unless I shell out another vBulletin license fee, hope to heck the DB isn’t trashed and ploughing the hundred or so hours to make it work, with crossed fingers and toes, only to have some hacker screw it up again.

If you’re here chasing tech documents then they will be linked below IF and WHEN I find the originals and upload them!

You could always jump onto eBay and buy some of the old store stock in clearing!

http://www.ebay.com.au/usr/au.mih2

Trust me I need to get rid of this stuff and move on!