Sorry about the issues over the last week. After the last debacle I am now on a new ISP.

I'm going to let this run for a day and then transfer the Survival UK main Site and try that with the intention of moving every site I have on to the new host.

The service from this ISP is excellent so if I hit any issues I'm not expecting it to take too long before it is fixed.

When Survival UK is up I'll post the full story.

It seems to be back now. Let me know if you have any issues.

I've had to rebuild the whole application. Thanks to .m. on the forum board who gave me advice on getting it back.

Just to confirm 1and1 are crap. One guy told me they had limited my bandwidth to stop server issue which 'may' have given us connection problems.

Pathetic support from my ISP so we are still crawling along.

Everything is working OK except for the speed it takes to load any PHP pages. Wait 5 mins per page and its working fine, if it doesn't timeout.

I've put a post on the main site if you have 10 minutes to spare.

Be back and working as soon as I can.

As you are more than likely aware we have had a few issues with the sites over the last week.

It hasn't been the main board celebrating its third birthay but was caused by a completely different site upgrading to the latest version of Wordpress. It seems the Wordpress team has now decided it wants a ton of processes and loads of additional memory instead of the simple system everyone loved. This shouldn't be a problem normally but my ISP, 1 and 1 have decided that my package, called Professional Unlimited, has a limit on the memory available which means I have now got a problem with memory. The package just hasn't kept up with the times where everything needs more memory so they want me to lose that package and upgrade. Their customer service sucks but that seems to be a standard nowadays.

Anyway, this upgrade caused memory issues across the server with every site running slow and with intermittent timeouts. It took a while to work out what it was because I was working away and when I started to investigate the performance was OK. It didn't help that the user had upgraded without telling me so I was in the dark a bit.

I've now sorted the issue so everything should be back to normal. Thank you to everyone who let me know by a multitude of methods.

I'm very disappointed with the bickering that has been going on on this forum over the last few months. It got worse over the last few weeks and I'm now making a stand. I've been too busy to moderate it correctly and it is obvious that some of you have taken advantage of that and broken the rules without any comeback from myself. No longer will this be tolerated. It is time to enforce the rules.

I've always wanted to have this site talking about nothing but prepping, avoiding politics and idle chatter. However I have been talked into allowing threads that have dubious links to prepping and touch on a wide range of subjects unrelated to prepping. It is these threads that touch on religion and politics that always lead to conflict. So I'm removing the threads on humour and news immediately. This doesn't mean you should post something from the news in any other forum under a thin justification because you believe it is prepper related. We know what the threats are, we have evaluated them and this forum is about discussing them. If I see anything then it will be deleted and the poster warned. I want posts on prepping only. So if you see something about rabid sheep in the UK then you can do an article on handling rabid sheep and include the link but an article just with a one liner and a link will get deleted and you will get a warning. Be sensible, avoid anything political and personal. If you genuinely believe something should be posted then PM me. I read my PMs several times a day but my emails only when not in work.

Now, the only real rule I have insisted on with this forum is do not abuse anyone yet people have been abused here for a while. Usually linked to a viewpoint that is controversial but abuse is still uncalled for. Now I do realise that some people really do talk crap but that can be discussed and refuted without calling them names. A post that you want to refute can be handled by saying 'I'm sorry old chap but I don't agree with your statement and then followed by an explanation why. It has an advantage over 'You stupid idiot that is a load of crap' in that you can explain to those reading why it is not suitable, they can learn and it won't get you a warning. If you personally do get abused then don't retaliate. Let me know as I won't be checking to see who started it I'll just see two sets of abuse and both will get a warning or banned. Abuse is abuse.

First the stick; First infraction I will delete the post and warn you by PM. If you do it again I'll just disable your account for a month. If after the month it happens again it'll be permanent. I just can't be bothered policing it more than that.

Now the carrot; Err.. You get to use my informational site for free. Isn't that enough?

While I'm here I'd like to apologise to the vast majority of posters who have not abused others and had to put up with abuse. I thank you for having the common sense to just ignore them and get on with learning how to prepare for an uncertain future.

I will be watching the site closely, as much as I can anyway, to ensure that your time on this site is fruitful and enjoyable. Let me know if anything upsets your quiet journey through this site.

Reposted from Main site.

So far my stance has always been to concentrate on the prepping and leave the updating of threats to the news. Deleting posts that I’ve tried it on here but it always degenerates into bickering and name calling. In many respects it’s like trying to moderate a school forum. It just takes too much time and is too disruptive to me.

However, I do agree that we need to pass on the information, it just isn’t working the way we are doing it.

So, after a long think and a discussion with some of the members I’ve decided that we can pass on the information but this time I’m putting the onus on to you, the forum members.

I’m going to modify the News area in the News forum. By default this will be a post only area and will not allow replies to posts.

I’m expecting you to check the News thread first for a similar post and if there already is one don’t post another. In addition it must be related to and applicable to preppers. Each post must include a link to the source and a explaination of what the article is about. Don’t just post a link with no explaination.

My only contribution to this will be to remove access from people who don’t follow these simple rules. I will also automatically delete any posts in other areas.

Let me know if you hit any problems with the upgrade.

Due to the ISP issues from a few days ago I am forced to upgrade the forum and web site software.

The forums will be unavailable on SUnday the 16th from 2200 to 2230 whilst I apply the upgrade and patches.

Over the weekend I've fielded a few complaints about posts placed on this forum. All the complaints have been about different people but have all been about the same thing. Comments dropped into the text which are seen as offensive.

Now I'm not one to support people whining about general comments but in the cases I've been looking at they are simply throw away remarks that add nothing to the debate and are all in the general threads about politics. I agree with the complaint.

Although we are not a political or religious site we see threats from politicians and religions and so I am happy to see those posted in the correct forums but we must not then jump on the bandwagon of lumping everyone in with the one bad apple in the post.

With hindsight we have been doing it for some time and so if you want to be able to continue posting news of a potentially controversial nature then we need to control how we respond to that post. No general attacks, no picking on groups where many in that group do not conform to the label you are about to put on them.

None of this happens, unless it goes off topic, in the prepping threads. If you want to keep the news threads then don't abuse them.