Hi Everybody,

The Wetpaint administrators have blocked the KFD forum at kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com for reasons known only to themselves. I'm trying to work it out with them, but haven't yet been able to get a straight answer. There is a message on the Wetpaint Central home page about a bunch of sites being blocked due to offensive content. Not sure how that applies to us, so maybe it's just a mistake. Meanwhile here is the plan: I'm working with Owen Becker to move the KFD forum to a new platform, one that will be more reliable than Wetpaint and with quicker page loads. I'll keep you updated here as it shapes up. We will do our best to move all the existing threads to the new site.

Thanks for your patience and looking forward to seeing you on the new and improved KFD forum.

-Kenneth

Thanks for the update. I tried to get on there and, for a second, thought I'd personally been blocked/banned. I hope the situation gets resolved and all that content is able to be saved for posterity.

Hi Alan,

Yes, there's something a little bit shocking about being blocked and you wonder if you should take it personally. Realizing that it isn't up to me whether the forum ever comes back online makes me ponder how much we are at the mercy of things we take for granted.

I've experienced a smaller version of that sensation -- realizing how much we are at the mercy of things we take for granted -- the first time my computer hard-drive crashed. My parents were just a few weeks away from giving me an external hard drive as a backup [I'd asked for it as a gift] when my computer crashed and never recovered. All the data inside -- which I'd thought of as real and almost material [movies, books on PDF, my writings, etc.] disapeared in the blink of an eye. I guess people have similar sensations when their houses burn down, etc. Sucks. I can't imagine why they have blocked the site. There was obviously [as we know] nothing "offensive" on there. Hopefully it is just a temporary error, like when I got "accidentally banned" from the DHO 'cause one of the admin's fingers slipped on their tablet...

# puts hand up

Ipad mini, fat finger tips and the banning button quite close to the recent posts link = "accidental banning"

Apologies.

It should be made clear that banning wil only happen after probably multiple warnings as was the case for james yen. If anyone finds themselves banned on the dho without reason and prior warning, it is most probably accidental. Contact one of us moderators via email if so (mine: nhalay at gmail)

Nick (mod)

Ahh OK then - another mystery. Glad to hear about the platform that would be cool to see it on a faster one.

Thanks

I have an offline backup I did of the site on November 19, 2012. Unfortunately that's the most recent one I have, but that's a lot of stuff that would be gone (possibly) otherwise.

Regards,
Jayson

That's great to hear though Jayson.

Thanks for letting us know. I'm looking forward to a more streamlined platform. Working with Wetpaint is all too frequently like watching paint dry. Laurel

I hope you will be using something open source, well supported, mature and with a large active development ecosystem Kenneth. Drupal or maybe Wordpress make good candidates. Use your own domain name on your own shared server (not a hosted thing like Wetpaint) for the obvious (now..) reasons.

Really sorry to see this happen to you and your fantastic site. Onwards and upwards...

@MuMuWu: OK, Jayson, that's fantastic; thanks to your backup, we have all the discussion threads through at least November 19th, and we'll see if we can get the rest. A couple of ideas:

-I know Daniel used custom software to strip the old DhO Wetpaint site of its discussion threads and move them here to the new DhO. I'll ask him about that.

I haven't checked yet, but the Internet Time Machine may have a recent snapshot of our forum.

@Laurel: You said that using Wetpaint is "like watching paint dry." LOL

@Bagpuss: Right you are. Even as we speak, I'm trying to configure bbPress, running on my Wordpress site, kennethfolkdharma.com, as our new forum. (Thanks to Omnipleasant for installing it a while back as a security measure in case of a crisis like this one.)

Sorry to hear about this, Kenneth. I hope the site gets back up soon and that the content can be recovered and transferred. I second the "watching paint dry" sentiment and think moving away from Wetpaint would be positive.

Jim / apperception

Thanks, Jim.

OK, just checked the Internet Time Machine. It looks like that isn't going to help us. We have Jayson's backup through mid-November, and I'm still hopeful that Wetpaint admin staff will get the site back online soon. Meanwhile, I'll get busy on the next incarnation of the KFD forum, so people can resume their practice threads.

Kenneth, you may also be able to salvage some content with Google's cache. Just add cache: before any of the forum URLs to see if Google picked them up.

Example

This is a pretty convenient way of using google's cached version:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fcache.nevkontakte.com%2Fproxy.html#go=kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com

As gutted I am about the lockdown on KFD, I am positively rejoicing about the possibility of a new platform! Bring it on!

This blows, but...



Long live KFD and the DhO!!!

OK, everybody, here is an opportunity for some do-it-yourself empowerment. Using the link that MuMuWu just posted for Google Cache, you may be able to save your practice threads between the dates of MuMuWu's last backup on November 19th and the time Wetpaint blocked our forum on January 22nd. It's up to you; since we don't know whether Wetpaint will put the site back online, you can buy yourself an insurance policy by accessing your pages via Google cache and cutting and pasting them into a document on your computer. I recommend this if you can possibly find the time. Once you have saved the information, we can try to figure out how to reconstruct it on the new site. Now get to work!

We're pretty close to opening up the new KFD forum for posting. Just need to figure out how to allow people to log on. Maybe tomorrow...? I'll keep you updated. Thanks for your patience and support.

@AndyW: Me too! Can't wait for the new, faster, cleaner, more reliable KFD forum.

It may be possible to use Warrick to save Kenneth's site from google's cache.

I tried to get it to run on windows by installing activeperl and the dependencies listed, however I couldn't make it work.

It there's anyone who runs linux and has some inkling on how to run perl scripts and such, you could give it a whirl.

The software can be located here: http://warrick.cs.odu.edu/

Instructions on running it on windows xp (I'm running windows 8 - could be part of the issue I'm having): http://www.cs.odu.edu/~fmccown/research/lazy/warrick-windows-install.html

More details and direct download link:
http://code.google.com/p/warrick/wiki/About_Warrick

"Warrick is a utility for reconstructing or recovering a website when a back-up is not available. Warrick uses Memento TimeMaps to discover archived copies of resources. Such resources may exist at the Internet Archive, Google, or another archival organization. Warrick will download the pages and images and will save them to your filesystem. Warrick can be run through our website or as a command-line utility (directions for downloading, installing, and running are given below)."
- from the last link above

My god - I had no idea how 'attached' I was to KFD until it went down!

I really hope Ron, Antero and Laurel's practice journals (in particular) don't get lost - they're such an invaluable resource for people like me......

I managed to get Warrick up & running. I set it to download as much as it can of the site closest to January 15th 2013 (which is before it was blocked). It might take a while. I'll see how it does and upload a zipped version of the archive to dropbox and put the link here if all goes well.

New KFD forum is live!

kennethfolkdharma.com/forums

Come by and post something!

Link added here:

Kenneth Folk Dharma

Awesome - Should we remake our logs and perhaps later the old ones will migrate or should we wait for our old stuff to move over first?

It's a no-go. It started using all 7 gigabytes of my server's RAM... and it had only gotten to downloading 400 pages which were all just account pages. We'll have to do something else - maybe run HTTRack on the wayback archive version of the site?

Thanks for trying, Claudiu. This is beyond my level of understanding, but I'm open to all suggestions and grateful for any help in getting the old threads up on the new site.

@Bill: Go ahead and restart your journal from today. It may be that we'll be able to get the old threads up on the new site as an archive, but I don't see us getting it up in a way that we can continue where we left off on the old threads, if you see what I mean. My hope is that we can have them to refer back to as the treasure trove of experience that they are.

Unfortunately, the Wayback Machine's most recent archive of the site is from April of 2012, as can be seen here: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com/ . MuMuWu's archive is much more recent.

If Wetpaint magically lets you export the database of the forum, then it could be imported to the new platform.

That is the key, though...WetPaint doesn't.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuucccccccccccccckkkkkkkkkkkkkk!

Much as I don't frequent the site as much as I used to, this would be tragic loss if a lot of that info couldn't be recovered. It's awesome that Jayson has got backups as recently as he has, but hopefully Wetpaint will get their fingers out of their asses and get this resolved to allow for an easier transfer of archived threads.

By the way, if anyone has any recommendations for threads they think would be worth archiving as part of this "Alaya Pragmatica" project I'm doing then let me know and hopefully that'll also allow us to keep some of the golden dharma available on Kenneth's site.

I'll stop by the new one later, glad to hear you've got a forum back up and running!

This "loss" of information seems to be an example of a great law of nature "the 3 Characteristics":
- Anicca: demonstrated through impermanence of information (of "mental content", of "dharmas"). Everything that arises is liable to disappearing, the information arises and passed away, believe of "loss" arises, etc...
- Dukkha: demonstrated through suffering caused by our attachment to sensations resulting out of liking the "information". Everything is unsatisfactory. Nothing to rely upon, especially on Wetpaint...
- Anatta: demonstrated through lack of control. This is "loss" is a wonderful reminder of it.
May you be unconditionally happy

Hey Kenneth, there was a lot of great stuff at the old website, not only the forum. Please keep it alive ;)
Regards,
Bernardo

New forum has been up and running for a while now. http://kennethfolkdharma.com/forum/

Some people, including myself have posted our old logs from the old wetpaint site.

-Russell

kfd site backed up here

http://jaytek.net/KFD/KFDForumOld/kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com/index.html