ATS Forum Survival Thread

I know we are all very happy and relieved that ATS is back online today.

Maybe it's a good time to remember:
With all things in life, one should prepare......hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
Whether it is ATS, your favorite gardening forum, your crypto forum, or any other aspect of online life.
One never knows these days what the future holds.

Many of us spent 4-5 days wondering about ATS, trying to find out what happened. Trying to find refuge elsewhere, trying to find ATS friends. Cursing because your thread is not available and may be gone.
Shaking your fist as you again try to load ATS, and check again at isitdown. And you know you did.....I sure did, and plenty.

So, you should prepare for the worst. And hope it doesn't happen.
For those people you'd like to keep in touch with, think about getting contact info.
Back up things/posts/threads you may want to keep.
Make a list of offline activities, you know those things you keep putting off because you just need to read Just. One. More. Thread???

Even think about an alternative place to meet up, be it FB or another conspiracy site. The local pub, restaurant or shopping mall for those who live in the same areas. Get creative.
But, please remember, threads and posts linking other forums are not allowed.

And, now that we are back:
ATS is Back Online Time to Backup Your Posts
You may or may not feel this is needed, but:
Change your passwords
And now that we are back, a rant is always in order:
WTF? WTF? WTF? That's all
And:
To whomever owns this site, Thanks!


Welcome back, ATSers.
You've survived another chapter of 'May you live in interesting times"
I hope to not hear that damn phrase EVER again.

It has been suggested I open this.
So......

a reply to: DontTreadOnMe

Was just bumping your thread before anyone jumps down my throat.

Is it fair game to post one's RSA *signing* key then?

To prepare for the eventuality that, this place one day goes down and ... doesn't come back up?

RSA Signing is Not RSA Decryption.

Encryption vs Signing with PGP: What's the Difference

For those that were chatting in the Reddit thread, I guess no biggie, because it was just some giggles.

But did you ever stop to wonder: is that Redditor named AM /really/ the guy from ATS?

o_O

Why, because of the 'posting style', or grammar or ....?

Hmm, I wonder why anyone would want to /claim/ to be person A...but really be person B, or say 'group B'.

Cryptographic signing is one of the only ways (the easiest way) to do digital ID verification over say, the Internet where nobody knows who's playground one is really climbing around on.

I mean, most of us here are just having fun, learning, teaching, and sharing info, so no harm no foul, but if you consider your reputation important, and have concerns that someone might

- do the equivalent of credit card identity theft to cash in on your forum ID,
- do things like to try entice others to say or do things that you personally would never try to convince another person do

Consider reading the above links, giving GPG/PGP a shot, and share your signature key at least with a few buddies that can, on the next stop on the ride, verify you really are who you claim to be.

If using GPG signing keys is verboten, that is a telling sign to me that folks are laying a honey pot, deliberately hoping to MitM people. I don't really have anything I worry about sharing with the alphabets, and I'm just a nobody, but others here might be concerned about imposters of the criminal type, and as we have seen....the organizational level ones...that put someone's lengthy post history and reputation to nefarious purposes.

Food for thought.

originally posted by: DontTreadOnMe
It has been suggested I open this.
So......

Unfortunately, we live in interesting times.

a reply to: DontTreadOnMe

Much respect. These are things we should talk about. The very basis of Survivalism is to prepare for the worst, but hope for the best. It sounds maudlin, but there is a truth there. We have all invested in this place, and for some of us, it is dear to us. I have four six pages of posts in the 'Daily Haiku' thread. Just today, I copied them all. No, they are not great works of a master, but they demonstrate a progression of me, from 2009 until now. That is worth something to me.

I think most of us have things that we want to save. I love your term of 'Forum Survival'. It really matters, and thank you for opening up this thread that we could talk about it. Bless

originally posted by: JinMI

originally posted by: DontTreadOnMe
It has been suggested I open this.
So......

Unfortunately, we live in interesting times.

Still, I find it just a wee bit more interesting than we really need.
I am not a huge fan of change, and since 2020.......

a reply to: DontTreadOnMe

Dont sweat it dear DToM, change, as well as bills are on the brink of obsolescence!

a reply to: argentus

Thanks!
There were a couple of posts I saved from 2020, when we feared all was lost.
This was one of them, maybe because I never read through all of it.
Seven Fires - William Commanda

I think it was wise of you to save your haiku thread to shown that progression.

I know my time here at ATS has honed my writing skills and kept my brain from turning to mush.
And that is without adding in the human element: the great people I have met here through the years.

a reply to: JinMI

GAH!

originally posted by: DontTreadOnMe
a reply to: JinMI

GAH!

a reply to: DontTreadOnMe

Did you save all the computer help you got over the past two decades?

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus
No.
And that was a concern.

ETA
ATS has always been a great place with great minds.
Cooking questions, computer questions, relationship questions.


I'm sure a lot of us will now become better prepared.
Maybe.
LOL

a reply to: DontTreadOnMe

For how many years (decades) have we heard the phrase, "Got Backup"? I know, I'm just as guilty/lazy.




Just upgraded to...

I was hanging out with Xuechen on his Youtube channel, under his latest video, which is months old, lmfao.

I'm happy and glad ATS is back up.

I haven't been able to browse or post on ATS properly for like a year now, whatever the outage was the problems seem to be gone. The site actually loads properly now and the constant timeouts seem to have stopped.

It's good to see AboveTopSecret.com improving in response speed hour-by-hour today, after being down for maintenance so many hours over the weekend.

It's somewhat Nostalgic watching photos load like they did in the 1990's (slow rendering/appearing), as ATS continues returning to normal.

Thanks to the crew who kept the forum from being totally obliterated by the enemy this past weekend!

All good advice and something I've been doing for awhile now. I will often complete my research before presenting it here then use the input to add to it off line. I may also post a thread on another forum or two then here. IMO it is limiting the creative potential of throwing it up willy-nilly, but I think it's important to bring it all together on your home network outside of the internet along with a cloud back up.

I have posts and threads on dead forums that I have gone back to to save it from vanishing altogether. I save many pages off line and save them on three hard drives on my network and have two cloud back ups. I got real tired of losing personal data like my family genealogy and archives, so I have back ups up the yin yang.

Can you pls recover my old account "dollukka" ? I had so much in it like short stories etc so i really would love to have that account back.