Believe it or not, we are halfway thru 2025 already... I hope everyone in North America enjoyed either July 4th or Canada Day, and came away from it with all their fingers and hearing.

We had quite the celebration here in Tennessee on Saturday, with friends and family each bringing fireworks as their donation to a cookout held where my brother in law is preparing to build his new home. The donations resulted in a show almost as long as what we saw in Oak Ridge on Friday along with 30,000...

During the time I've been managing the site, I've tried to be as transparent as possible regarding its operational and financial stability. Like it or not, there are aspects that need to be managed like a business, mainly making sure costs are covered adequately by donations and memberships.

As mentioned on a few occasions, the price of the First Class Membership has remained at $29.95 since 2012, even though the costs of running the site have changed. Some (particularly storage) have...

Sorry Folks, but it's getting out of control again. I've had to lock down "Guest" access.

If you're a legitimate user who doesn't want to create an account just to browse, you can try logging in with Ghostuser as the user and password.

Older members, queue up Thin Lizzy: https://youtu.be/X5SrvSeYe9k?t=22

Younger members... here's the modern AI generated version:

Guess...

Yep, it's May. And I skipped the April monthly site update entirely.

To be more accurate, I wrote an update, and then the bot attacks hit (all remedied....), so I scrapped it. And then, well....... as I've found out a few times in life, God has a sense of humor.

As some might recall, my wife and I bought land in Tennessee last year, with the plan to move sometime in late 2026. In early April, our plans got moved up with very little notice, and we put our house up for sale....

I'm sure you've probably noticed some server instability over the last couple days.

There's no clear smoking gun, but what I did discover digging around is that we saw a huge jump in site access starting on Saturday. By Monday, there was 20 times as much activity...

I suspect the real issue was the access logs. When you have increased activity, logs grow accordingly.... As a log file size increases, the amount of time needed to insert each new transaction also increases,...