A monument to all our sins. Decommissioned 12/17/2014.
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Due to recent unfortunate events I must say farewell to you all. I can no longer be your administrator, I will no longer be posting, and most importantly I will be closing the site.There are a few things that I've tried to keep a secret from zoklet over the last few years - I hinted to some of them in my "Where did zok go?" thread but since this is the end, I might as well tell you. I have a few serious health issues and some mounting medical bills as a result. I'm also currently in between jobs and can't afford to keep the website online, nor do I have any desire to.Zoklet is a money pit no matter how you look at it. While it may make a few bucks off of ads (in the past we even made a PROFIT off of ads), that says nothing for the amount of liability and legal issues the website generates. Over the years, I've been contacted and questioned by the FBI, secret service, local law enforcement, lawyers, and nosy reporters. Even if the website makes money, nothing will keep those forces at bay. And often times they end up costing a lot of money themselves in legal fees. It has not been a fruitful adventure.The website has also been a major source of stress for me over the last few years and it's only made my health problems worse - a lot worse. I was hoping that with my recent push for changes on the website I'd be able to reappear as a member and even a leader, but that is no longer looking like a viable option. After trying to become more active and dealing with the problems facing the community, things have only gotten worse for me. According to my doctors: if I don't want to die a young man, I need to quit - period. Adding to that, someone's been threatening to post my personal information (as well as that of my family) and all the other standard threats. This has all just solidified my desire to make my departure. I don't need this in my life any more.As HST once said: it was time, I felt, for an agonizing reappraisal of the whole scene.With that said, I will be shutting off the forums in the next couple of days. A short time later, I will be shutting down the site altogether. Because I don't want to see the community become any more fragmented than it already has been over the years, I encourage you all to make plans to find a new home now. If you guys can come to a general consensus on where you'd like your new home to be, I will redirect zoklet.net to that location. I will also file a change of URL with both google and bing so that you get the traffic that zoklet usually has. But just as totse.com will forever be Jeff's, zoklet.net will always be mine. I'm going to keep ownership of the domain for the years to come. It is not for sale and neither is the website itself.Anyone who wishes to create a static archive of the website (to put in a torrent or whatever) may do so. I suggest that you organize your efforts so that you don't just DDOS the server with everyone trying to scrape the thing at once, though.Whether you love me or hate me, we've all been through a lot together. I know I've dropped the ball on more than one occasion and if I could take it all back I would. I may not have been the best leader in the world, but I've always given it my all and everything. I'm just sorry that it wasn't always enough.I ask that for my own sanity you do not try to make contact with me after reading this. I will be abandoning my gmail address, changing my phone number, and in the weeks to come, moving as well. I will never be coming back. Let me live the rest of my life in peace.Anyone who I want to contact me will already have a means in which to do so. I will not be signing into IRC again either - the channel #zok will likely expire and #totse will be given to O_RLY. My IRC server will be disconnected as well.And sadly, this will be my last post on zoklet. It's been a pleasure to be here with you guys all these years. I've spent nearly half of my life with this community and it pains me more than anything to leave it behind. My time here is done though, and I need to go. I wish you all the best of luck. It has been so good to hear it <3Admins: please use this thread to link to other people's websites who wish to carry on the community. Organize the list as you see fit."So far, everyone seems to be migrating to: Sanctuary"TTFN!__________________There used to be a bunch of assholes that posted on this part of zoklet here... But we systematically removed them like you would any kind of termite or roach.
For anyone looking to start up their own website to host the remaining members of the community, there are a few technical details that may serve you well: Find a host that is offshore but has good latency. Read the host's terms of service and acceptable use policies thoroughly. Make sure they're OK with the kind of content you want to host. A good rule of thumb is to look for warez hosts or fringe pornography hosts. If you accept zoklet's traffic, you will need LOTS of bandwidth. Look for a place that offers unlimited bandwidth if possible. You will be DDOS attacked. Maybe not right away, but eventually you'll get hit with a big one and it will knock you offline. Find a host who does not care about ddos traffic or set up a reverse proxy (cloudflare or prolexic or something) Zoklet currently has a dedicated 3ghz dual core machine with 8gb ram. We use all of this. A cloud solution will likely not work unless you separate web from db - even then you'll have to pay a lot. I host with sharktech because of their unlimited bandwidth policy and "ddos protection" It costs about 80 dollars per month. With SSL certificates, domain name registrations, IRC services, and various other nickle-and-dime expenses, it usually manages to cost upwards of 100 USD per month. You will get regular DMCA complaints. Make sure you take care of these ASAP. I suggest that you mirror as much of zoklet's content as you can and write clever .htaccess rewrite rules to forward crawler bots to the mirrored content (eg, when a bot comes looking for /bbs/index.php you forward them to /zoklet_archive/bbs/index.php. Make sure your own BBS is in a separate directory though - like /community/ or /forum/ so that it won't get confused between the archive and your community). I suggest using a linux based server. Mine runs CentOS with OSSEC and CSF for security purposes. I can send you my configurations for these services if you like so that you don't have to set it up on your own. There are a few advertisers on the site as it is. If you would like to do advertising with them for your new site, please contact them - I'm sure they'd love to do business with you to help alleviate some of the bills. If you have any technical concerns, I urge you to ask the folks on freenode irc. They're some of the best nerds in the universe and they'll help you with just about any problem you can come up with... just be prepared for them to make fun of you first. I hope you take some of totse's views into mind when setting up your own ground rules and values. Freedom of information, anonymity, and the occasional paranoid belligerence. Never forget your roots. I also hope that you can learn from some of zoklet's mistakes and take into consideration a lot of the ideas which were posted in the suggestions thread the other week. And from one admin to another: No matter what rules or systems you put in place, you should know that your users will always find a loophole. Do yourself a favor and keep it simple.
