Welcome to the St Helens Connect reboot.

[tony j]

I am back too, though I had to refresh Recaptcha about ten times to find one I could actually see with my colour vision problems.

[familyman]

Hi all,great to see "Connect" back up and running.

[Brianza]

Well done Dave - I have missed the old stories and photos of St Helens.

[Dave]

There is a lot to do. The decision to bring it back was only made 6 days ago, and up until then, I hadn't spent any time at all planning how to do that and what to put on as the forum software. We looked at a few different platforms, even installing a few to see which might work best. Considering add-ons and a few other things, we went for this phpBB. The first idea was just going to be a message board or forums because that's what people said they missed the most, but other things will follow.

[Big_Jeff_Leo]

Greetings, earthlings!

[Lankylass]

Hi Dave & Everyone, Well I finally figured out how to navigate the new site, looking forward to the future of the new St. Helens Connect. Thanks to Dave for all your help & hard work.

[Boblyn]

I have to be honest and say that I have not been onto the site, for many reasons, this past 12 months and did not know that the original site had ceased to be online. I am unaware of the reason the original site closed as there was no information sent out to say what was happening so it was a bit of a surprise when I tried to log on and couldn't. At least I am now back on so can keep up with the news and everything else, it's nice to read about the town in mid 1900's and wait with baited breath for more story's.
Boblyn

[Singe]

I am unaware of the reason the original site closed as there was no information sent out to say what was happening so it was a bit of a surprise when I tried to log on and couldn't.
Boblyn

I think Dave was just finding it too hard top keep the old site running with all the patch-ups he had to do. After a few weeks off I reckon all the regulars were really missing it and Dave decided to get it up and running again. A star as I'm aware it seems to be a lot less divisive on the new site!

[Monica]

Yeah, couldn't agree with you more Singe, no one wants the site closed down again so we're all on our best behaviour - for now anyway

[Dave]

There was total frustration with the old site. It wouldn't have been too bad if the old forums could have been converted to one like this one, but that would have been very difficult because in one of the so-called 'upgrades' to the forum software, they converted the storage of posts from plain text and BBCodes to HTML, and converting them back would have been a nightmare. On top of that, a lot of those posts would have had to be pruned/removed. We were carrying too many posts that nobody would ever want to read again. Then the old St Helens Rolls of Honour site was no longer working properly. It would only partially run with web server software that is fast becoming obsolete. So I thought, right, OK, we'll just do away with it all then; nobody will care, I won't care, so that'll be that. But people did care, and I cared too—hence the reboot and a staggeringly 'interesting' learning curve and trying to make sense of all the 'required' changes needed if I wanted to dabble with web programming again.

[Monica]

I'm back again! I was locked out of the site for a while but just managed to get back in, thanks to Dave and Neil. No idea what went wrong but I'll be more careful this time.

[Dave]

After a bit of an overnight onslaught by bots or spammers, new registrations are currently turned off.

If you are a genuine human that wants to join, I suggest that you might join the Facebook group and request that we might look at you as being a potential member.

[Boblyn]

Hi Dave, glad that I managed to get my registration in before the problems. I'm no tech person and would have had problems being able to re-join as firstly - and I don't believe that I am the only one - I refuse to use Facebook due to problems a relation had with Facebook which could have affected ourselves. We, my wife and I, do not use any of the other social media platforms like Twitter, Tik Tok or anything like that because being old school we just don't and if I had tried to rejoin AFTER the bot/ scammer attacks I would have been able to. I don't know what the answer is and maybe the actions you have taken might be the right ones but hope that there is no true previous members who have been unable to rejoin.
Understand totally your reasons to close the original site and take a well earned break before the reboot and thank you for doing so.

[Dave]

Hi, thanks for coming back on.

There had been similar problems with the old board, and registrations had been turned off for quite a while before it closed. I think that everyone who wanted to come back on is here now anyway. There had been about 4 times as many spammers as real members, and it is a proper rigmarole dealing with them. There are about 13 "guests" (bots) hanging around at this moment, and sometimes the number is a lot higher. There is more bandwidth being used by bots than by real members, and it is so quiet in terms of real member activity that I'm tempted to make it into a part-time website.

[Alan]

I think that if you made it just a couple of days a week, then it would soon die a death completely

[Dave]

Probably. It was just a bizarre thought. Not without experience though, because I had a dial-up BBS in the 1990s that was only on at weekends.

[Dave]

Sorry if you tried to get on and if you received a 'blocked' message. We've been trying to implement a method of blocking all those bots that were causing excessive usage warnings. If that can be sorted out, then we may be able to reenable registrations.

[Dave]

Further to the above, you'll probably notice a few delays while Cloudflare checks whether you're a malicious bot or not. Quite a few of those have been identified, and they're being dealt with. 'Tis a bit of a nightmare.

[Ratty]

I'm back ok

What are they doing to cause usage Dave?

[Dave]

I don't know for sure, but it was php executions, which could mean literally anything and everything, like repeatedly 'clicking' links to load pages for no other reason than causing a nuisance. The stats looked terrible. You only need to look at yesterday, when only about 12 actual members logged in and didn't do very much, and then at nearly 10 past 6, there were 142 "guests" hanging around. So we've put Cloudflare on, and rules have been set to exclude the worst of them.

[Ratty]

Bizarre.

[roger]

Not visited for some time, but looking forward to reading some fascinating posts

[gillosborne]

Hi
I'm looking for information on Private 21272 James Bolton. He is my grandad's brother who was killed in the Battle of Arras on 9 April 1917. We are intending to travel to France next year to find his grave if possible. Thank you for any help

[Dave]

Hi
I'm looking for information on Private 21272 James Bolton. He is my grandad's brother who was killed in the Battle of Arras on 9 April 1917. We are intending to travel to France next year to find his grave if possible. Thank you for any help

If you click this link, select World War I, use Bolton in the surname search, and you should find him. That's all we have about him.

[Andyr00]

Oh there sure will

Is that a threat?