Retirement and forum shutdown (17 Jan 2022)
Hi,
John Howell who has managed the forum for years is getting on and wishes to retire from the role of managing it.
Over the years, he has managed the forum through good days and bad days and he has always been fair.
He has managed to bring his passion for fish keeping to the forum and keep it going for so long.
I wish to thank John for his hard work in keeping the forum going.
With John wishing to "retire" from the role of managing the forum and the forum receiving very little traffic, I think we must agree that forum has come to a natural conclusion and it's time to put it to rest.
I am proposing that the forum be made read-only from March 2022 onwards and that no new users or content be created. The website is still registered for several more years, so the content will still be accessible but no new topics or replies will be allowed.
If there is interest from the ITFS or other fish keeping clubs, we may redirect traffic to them or to a Facebook group but will not actively manage it.
I'd like to thank everyone over the years who helped with forum, posted a reply, started a new topic, ask a question and helped a newbie in fish keeping. And thank you to the sponsors who helped us along the away. Hopefully it made the hobby stronger.
I'd especially like to thank John Howell and Valerie Rousseau for all of their contributions, without them the forum would have never been has successful.
Thank you
Darragh Sherwin
Forum back
- JohnH (John)
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Many thanks must go to Darragh for resolving this for us.
John
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N. Tipp
We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl - year after year.
ITFS member.
It's a long way to Tipperary.
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- derek (Derek Doyle)
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Unfortunately we suffered some 'downtime' overnight but all is well for the time being.
Many thanks must go to Darragh for resolving this for us.
John
obviously nobody noticed

thanks john and daragh for the hard work of keeping the site alive.
30 tanks specialise in african cichlids, angelfish and various catfish
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- irish-zx10r (James feenan)
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Something fishie going on here
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Stuart.
Multi tasking: Screwing up more than one thing at a time.
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- JohnH (John)
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I am thinking (careful John) that perhaps some 'maintenance' is occurring. I'll try to find out more.
Please be patient - go out and enjoy the sun, it might be the last we see of it this Summer...
John
Location:
N. Tipp
We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl - year after year.
ITFS member.
It's a long way to Tipperary.
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- JohnH (John)
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I had to abandon my garden-sitting as a result of them!!!
John
Location:
N. Tipp
We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl - year after year.
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It's a long way to Tipperary.
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Stuart.
Multi tasking: Screwing up more than one thing at a time.
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- LemonJelly (Johnny Cowley)
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ye guys are lucky, every time i try to sit in my garden I'm attacked by children.
Stuart.
I hope they're yours, cos otherwise that's just weird

"The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of your life; your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you.They're freeing your soul."
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- JohnH (John)
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Many thanks must go to Darragh again for bringing us back online.
I'm not altogether certain how many of you know how much he does 'behind the scenes' for us, but I can assure you that we'd be well and truly 'up a creek without a paddle' without his input (in more ways than one).
Thanks Darragh.
John
Location:
N. Tipp
We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl - year after year.
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It's a long way to Tipperary.
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Thanks a bunch
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- wylam (Stuart Sexton)
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@lemon, yes they are all my children, at least i hope so lol.
Stuart.
Multi tasking: Screwing up more than one thing at a time.
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Fishkeeping the Only way to get wet and wild
currently 25 tanks, and breeding is the aim of everything i keep
location:Limerick
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- darragh (Darragh Sherwin)
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Apologies for the downtime after the last few days.
Several of the sites I run got compromised over the last few days by hackers with nothing better to do and this has lead to periods of downtime. I have not put much effort into fixing it as I was planning to move the site to a new server over the next few weeks.
However given the recent compromises and downtime my plan to move to a new server has been moved up and will hope to move to a new server over the next week or 2
Regards
Darragh
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Fishkeeping the Only way to get wet and wild
currently 25 tanks, and breeding is the aim of everything i keep
location:Limerick
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- sheag35 (Seamus Gillespie)
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@Darragh When you say compromised people may be concerned about data, was it DDoS attack?
ok spot the non computer person here.... what the heck is a DDos attack???
Fishkeeping the Only way to get wet and wild
currently 25 tanks, and breeding is the aim of everything i keep
location:Limerick
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@Darragh When you say compromised people may be concerned about data, was it DDoS attack?
ok spot the non computer person here.... what the heck is a DDos attack???
Well shea if I share my understanding or it... I can see a double-d in there somewhere so maybe it was a female attacker



Below tank is for sale
my plywood tank build.
www.irishfishkeepers.com/index.php/forum...k-build-diary#137768
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- irish-zx10r (James feenan)
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i know it was talked about on another post but has anymore taught gone into the use of tapatalk
app for phone users? good to see it back up and running ,keep up the good work lads.
Something fishie going on here
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- darragh (Darragh Sherwin)
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<some nerdy stuff>
It wasn't a DDOS attack but certainly had the hallmarks of one.
It was a cause by a memory overrun bug in PHP.
The server is running on FreeBSD 6.2 which is quite old now and all sites run on the same webserver, so when one sites gets compromised, the whole webserver goes down.
The new server will be an Ubuntu box with each site having it's own web server so if one gets attacked, then the others won't be affected.
<end nerdy stuff>
Regards
Darragh
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