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Server is back online

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There were some unplanned network changes which knocked the site offline for about a week. The fix was pretty easy, but just took some time and coordination. The changes in the network are still making their way around the Internet, though, so let others know that access will be spotty for another day or two.

There was also a hardware problem with one of the disks which was addressed at the same time. There looks to have been some damage to some files, but nothing major so far and no lost data that I can see.

Posted at: Sat March 8, 2008 - 3:27 PM | Posted by: tinker

New Registered Billyheads - Please Read!

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First of all, if you are new to the site, welcome!

It appears some users who sign up for a username on the Billyhead Message Board aren't having their confirmation emails being sent out to them, which will in turn, allow them to post and reply to topics on the board. If this is the case and you haven't received your confirmation email within 24 hours, please email me - goodstuff@billyheads.com stating your username you signed up with. You will be contacted ASAP.

Also, when you sign up for a username, please include a VALID email address in your profile so you can be contacted.

Thanks for your time, and happy Billyhead'ing!

Posted at: Tue September 25, 2007 - 06:42 AM | Posted by: goodstuff

Server Status - Back to full strength

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The server is back to normal. The bad disk has been replaced with no loss of data.

Posted at: Mon February 26, 2007 - 6:52 PM | Posted by: tinker

Server Status - working again, but still sick

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The server is back (obviously) after encountering a hardware problem. Sorry for the extended downtime. I was away for the weekend and didn't get notified about the failure until Saturday (despite Jeff's calls -- thanks for your retries, Jeff).

Follow status HERE

Posted at: Mon February 26, 2007 - 1:28 PM | Posted by: tinker

Important Changes

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An important announcement regarding recent events and some changes to the site has been made HERE in the Website Chat forum.

Posted at: Wed October 11, 2006 - 8:43 PM | Posted by: tinker

MDA Collections: Final total $8600.00
Collections are over. To donate, give directly to the MDA, please.

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Our annual fundraising drive in support of Muscular Dystrophy Association is once again in progress.

Please consider donating to this very important and worthy cause. You can read more about our drive in THIS TOPIC.

If you're able to participate, your prompt attention is important. PayPal provides the swiftest and most certain way to donate, but there are many other options.

Thanks for your support.

The final totals will be made at 11:59PM Sunday night, Eastern Time. If you're donating on Sunday or will be sending money in, notify Tom (tinker) by Private Message (click here) so that we can ensure that you're included. We will cover your with the MDA until we receive your donation.

[font color=red]COLLECTIONS HAVE ENDED. PLEASE GIVE DIRECTLY TO THE MDA.[/font]

Posted at: Sat August 19, 2006 - 12:13 PM | Posted by: tinker

BillyHeads Lanyards

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Check out the new BillyHeads lanyards now available to members. Like everything else here, their cost is included in the price of membership!

Read all about it HERE

Enjoy!

Posted at: Wed June 14, 2006 - 2:47 PM | Posted by: tinker

Billy's Birthday visit to WCTK

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Audio clips from Billy's visit to WCTK on his 18th birthday are available in the Audio Galleries, here.

Posted at: Sat May 27, 2006 - 7:19 PM | Posted by: tinker

BILLY'S Q&As

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Though we hope to see it return to the Message Board at a later date, the "Question and Answer" topic hosted by Billy has been suspended for now due to his schedule.

The first installment of the Q&A still makes for good reading and learning about Billy! It may be viewed here.

Posted at: Wed February 22, 2006 - 09:27 AM | Posted by: MikeR

EMERGENCY MAINTENANCE
RE-scheduled for Saturday evening Feb 4th

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An update: The failing drive is continuing to work, so I held off from rushing to fix things. This also gave me time to better plan the work.

Expect the server (including the website, message board, email, etc.) to be unavailable for a couple of hours during the ~~morning or early afternoon~~ afternoon and evening of Saturday, February 4th.

Posted at: Fri February 3, 2006 - 9:27 PM | Posted by: tinker

EMERGENCY MAINTENANCE!!!

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A hard drive appears to be failing, so I'm going to have to take the system as soon as I get a chance, probably this evening, Wednesday February 1st, if I can get a replacement drive.

It's not as bad as it sounds. There are redundant drives, and this is one of three that share the data, so even if it completely dies, nothing will be lost. But, I want to get us back to full redundancy as soon as possible.

So, if the site is unavailable, trust that it will be back as soon as possible.

/tom (tinker)

Posted at: Wed February 1, 2006 - 3:25 PM | Posted by: tinker

Happy Fifth Birthday, BillyHeads!!
Share your thoughts with us

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As we celebrate our fifth birthday, come share your thoughts on where we've been, where we are, and where we're going. Visit this topic and join the celebration.

Posted at: Sat October 15, 2005 - 6:29 PM | Posted by: tinker

MDA Collections: Total collected: $6,600.01
Thanks, Everyone!!!

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Once again this year, we pooled our resources in support of The Muscular Dystrop ...r Dystrophy Association.

You can read more about our drive in THIS TOPIC.

If you missed your chance to chip in with us, there's still time to help out this very important and worthy cause. Be sure to tune into the Labor Day Telethon and phone in your donation. It matters.

Posted at: Fri September 2, 2005 - 4:27 PM | Posted by: tinker

MDA Collections: Current total $6,356.01
LAST CALL!!!

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Once again this year, we are pooling our resources in support of The Muscular Dystrop ...r Dystrophy Association.

Please consider donating to this very important and worthy cause. You can read more about our drive in THIS TOPIC.

We're off to a late, and relatively slow, start, so your prompt attention is important. PayPal provides the swiftest and most certain way to donate, but there are many other options.

Thanks.

Posted at: Wed August 24, 2005 - 07:08 AM | Posted by: tinker

200,000 Posts!!

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The community has now reached and passed the 200,000 post mark!! Read some of your fellow members' thoughts on the milestone here.

Thanks to everyone for making this such a vibrant and fun community.

Posted at: Thu June 9, 2005 - 7:20 PM | Posted by: tinker

26 hour outage :-(

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Well, in preparation for the summer months of less-than-perfectly-stable electrical power, the ISP was doing some work on their battery backup systems. It knocked out our server at noon yesterday and they didn't realize it until I reached them earlier today. Sorry, folks!

Posted at: Sun June 5, 2005 - 4:02 PM | Posted by: tinker

MDA FINAL COLLECTIONS: $17,182.95

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This total represents all the sums collected from members ($11,532,95) and the total raised from the auctioning of the two autographed leather jackets that Billy donated ($3650 and $2000, respectively).

Congratulations and thanks to all the participants on a very successful project for a very worthy cause.

Posted at: Sun October 10, 2004 - 2:54 PM | Posted by: tinker

MDA Donations: Grand Total $11,532.95

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An odd number, to be sure, but a great showing for a great cause.

Thanks to everyone that made this possible!!

(This total represents the funds contributed directly by Billy's fans. It does not include employer matching funds or the proceeds from the auctioned jackets.)

Posted at: Wed September 1, 2004 - 3:23 PM | Posted by: MikeR

MDA Collections: Current total $11,541
LAST CALL!!!

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Please consider giving to this worthy charity. Details are in this topic in the Billy Chat forum.

The deadline is today Monday, August 30th. All donations must be accounted for (even if not yet received) by Monday evening. The check will be cut Tuesday morning so it can get to Billy in plenty of time. If your donation might not arrive on time, let Tom know (send a Private Message to 'tinker' or an email to tcrowley@billyheads.com) so he can be sure to have the correct total.

We are in the final stages, collecting final numbers from all the participating groups. The total shown now reflects the sum of all of the collections from the fans groups.

Posted at: Tue August 10, 2004 - 12:13 PM | Posted by: tinker

Server Instability and Upgrades

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As you've all noticed, we've had a stretch of bad server availability lately. Mostly, it's been due to power issues. The most recent outage (April 8th), though was due to a plain old hardware problem.

As time permits, I've been working on assembling a new system that will be faster, easier to manage, and (hopefully!!) much more reliable.

Details follow, for those who care:

The ISP where the server is housed has a backup generator, but has a weird problem where the frequency of the power generated is somehow incompatible with the main UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply - a.k.a. battery backup) that he has. Thus, the site is more susceptible to longer power outages since the generator is required to provide power beyond that which is covered by the batteries.

Yesterday morning, I replaced the battery that keeps the clock running in the server, because whenever we DID lose power, the clock was losing time, resulting in various problems once we came up again. These included the inability of many members to post, since the server would compare the time to that of their most recent post (which was actually in the 'future') and prohibit the post based on the rate limiting settings.
When I left the server, it appeared to be running fine. (I had replaced the battery without shutting down.) Unfortunately, I didn't check, and when I did try to get to the site later, I discovered that it was down.
This morning, after about an hour of diagnosis, I found that the cause of the problem was just a controller board that needed to be reseated (removed and re-inserted). Given that I had my hands in there right before it 'broke', I'm sure that I bumped the board and it took the opportunity to take a brief vacation.

The new server will include its own UPS, to better isolate it from any power issues.

The new server will also include a remote access feature to permit it to be remotely administered, including controlling the power and booting.

The new server will have significantly more memory and a much newer and slightly faster processor. That sounds great, but considering that the current system is a 450MHz Pentium II with 384MB of RAM, the step up to a Pentium III 666MHz with 768MB of RAM should definitely speed certain tasks, like searching.

The new server will include a lot of updated software, which should actually speed the downloading of pages to anyone with a relatively recent browser. The new software can compress the data before sending it through the Internet. (Another use for the speedier CPU.) This should even speed access for those with dial-up lines, since less data will have to be transferred.

There will definitley be some downtime required, but I have no idea when that will be scheduled for.

I'll post updates in the Website Chat forum, and post significant developments here.

Thanks for your patience.

Posted at: Fri April 9, 2004 - 09:38 AM | Posted by: tinker

BillyHeads for MDA - The Grand Total is...

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$3000.00!!!

See this post for a list of the donations and a separate list of donors.

Everyone should be enormously proud to be part of such a generous and caring community. We raised DOUBLE what was raised two years ago and I know that the MDA, Billy, Mattie, and most especially, those who the MDA helps, will be very thankful.

*BUT* while BillyHeads' fundraiser may be completed, the MDA Telethon has yet to begin. We hope that everyone watches the Telethon and encourages their friends and family to donate to the MDA.

As MikeR outlined in this post of the same topic, there are many volunteer opportunities available for those who would like to work with the MDA.

Please help in any way you can. And consider organizing something through your school or workplace to help out. Some ideas take time to develop, and it's never too early to start preparing for next year's fundraising. The local MDA offices are ready, willing, and able to help you.

Posted at: Fri August 22, 2003 - 11:42 AM | Posted by: tinker

BillyHeads for MDA - $2771 - Last Call!

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Our fundraiser is nearly over. The August 18th deadline is past, but the donations keep arriving. If you will be making a donation, of if you've made one and it hasn't yet been acknowleged yet, please be sure to let us know!! Please see this post for additional information.

Posted at: Thu August 21, 2003 - 8:39 PM | Posted by: tinker

Important News

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Important news about Billy is breaking. Please keep an eye on this thread in Billy News for more information as it is received.

Posted at: Thu June 12, 2003 - 7:50 PM | Posted by: jbravata

Server Maintenance

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The maintenance scheduled for this morning, Tuesday March 25, is complete and successful without any service interruption. Although the change should be transparent, please be sure to let us know if you see any behavior changes. You may do so via the Website Forum, or via the Feedback page available on all site pages other than the message board.

Posted at: Tue March 25, 2003 - 09:52 AM | Posted by: tinker

Server Maintenance

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We will be doing some scheduled maintenance on Tuesday morning, March 25th at about 9AM Eastern time. Please check the topic in the Website Chat forum for additional information and status. Thanks for your patience.

Posted at: Sat March 22, 2003 - 3:22 PM | Posted by: tinker

Website Updates

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There have been many updates to the site, and especially to the message board. You can keep up-to-date on the most recent updates by looking at THIS thread.

Thanks, Jon, for all the hard work in continuing to improve our home on the 'net.

Posted at: Fri January 10, 2003 - 11:00 PM | Posted by: tinker

BillyHeads has moved to a new server

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The site has been moved. At this point, everything appears to have gone very smoothly. And, aside from a marked improvement in performance, we hope that you haven't noticed any changes!

For the next few days, please keep your eyes out for things that may have broken. And, as always, your observations and patience are very much appreciated. Let us know if you see anything wrong. You can either use the Report Post link if it's related to the message board, or send a PM to Jon and or me, or use the Contact link that's on the bottom of every other page on the site.

Thanks again for all your patience and support. As Jon said a few days ago, this new server is a big step forward for the BillyHeads. There will be some hitches as we do this, but the move will offer us the ability to offer much better service as we continue to grow. Just as an example, we used to be limited to 200MB of storage. the new server has nearly 500 times that storage and can be quickly, cheaply, and easily expanded. This means more room for videos, full sized photos (suitable for printing), and all manner of other services and possibilities.

Right now, the area that's in most need of our attention seems to be the chatroom. While the new chat server is very reliable, expandable, customizable, and fast, it is not fully compatible with the specialized browser based client that the old server had provided. The basic functionality is there, and Jon has invested an enormous effort in figuring out how to get it to work better, and we're continuing to examine several possible solutions, including continuing to customize the server to accomodate that client, offering different clients, or both.

Please report any unusual behavior that you see. We need your help in tracking down any problems. Thanks.

Posted at: Sun August 4, 2002 - 11:43 AM | Posted by: tinker

Changes to BillyHeads Email service

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ATTENTION!

Beginning Monday, July 22nd, we are planning to begin the process of moving the BillyHeads email service to a new server.

Unfortunately, we have no way to move the existing registrations over to the new server, so you'll have to register your name again. In order to facilitate your cutover, the new server will accept mail addressed to "name@billyhead.com" (note the missing 's'!) for about a week. That way, even before we make the cutover, you can start forwarding any message on the existing system which you really want to keep.

We will not be renewing the monthly service with the current provider of the BillyHeads email service. If you do not save messages that you want to keep, you will lose them.

To register, go to http://mail.billyhead.com. Once you're registered, you can use the same webpage to send and receive your mail. For those who wish to do so, you should also be able to access the server using your favorite email program, too. Directions will be forthcoming.

Once the email server is up and running, we will then begin the process of moving the rest of the site, including the message board, the image galler, the audio and video clips, and the chatroom over to the new server. It is possible that we will start that process this coming week, too, but we will keep you updated with the details of the schedule, as things progress. We will try to make the cutover as smooth as possible, but there may well be periods when all or part of the site is unavailable.

Stay tuned here for updates and please report any problems in the Website Forum. If possible, include the address/URL of the page where you saw the problem (if it's a web page), and basically any other info that will help us try to reproduce it.

Thanks for your patience, cooperation, problem reports, and support.

[duplicate message posted to Website Forum]

Posted at: Sun July 21, 2002 - 12:08 AM | Posted by: tinker

Website Chat Forum

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I know a number of you guys don't read the Website Chat forum, but I encourage you to do so. Very often, important site information is posted there and nowhere else and if you don't read it, you're going to miss out on something that may very well effect you.

Recently posted in there, of interest to everybody:

+ A new "BillyHeads of the Month" program, and the first month's winners;

+ Information about the new PM system, and the message limit being reduced in a few days.

Information about new board/site programs and policies will appear in this forum, so please be sure to check it out once in a while. A lot of important site-related questions are answered there that could help you out in whatever you are doing.

Jon

Posted at: Sun July 7, 2002 - 4:59 PM | Posted by: jbravata

BillyHeads.com Email / One Month Reprieve

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We've went ahead and paid the incredibly unreasonable fee that BigMailBox wants per month to keep the service active. We've only bought one month, but we hope that it is enough time for us to get up a solution.

We will be putting up our own box on the Internet and moving everything over there in due time--the website, the chat room, and the email accounts all included. Unfortunately that will mean you have to re-register your email accounts, because BigMailBox will not share any of your information with us (for privacy reasons). I'll let you all know when it comes time for that.

(Old information follows)

BigMailBox.com, which has hosted our BillyHeads.com email for us since its inception, has decided to pull the plug "effective immediately" due to "high demand".

We're not exactly sure what we're going to do. It's very possible that we will choose to run our own mail servers on a *nix box. No matter what we decide, it appears that your email will not work for some period of time. We'll try to get it back up, one way or another, as soon as possible.

We're sorry for any inconveinience, but this is truly out of our control. Thanks for your patience.

Jon

Update

We've been given a short amount of time to get our emails off our accounts. We're not sure entirely how long, but it is in the area of 24 hours from now (11:55 AM on 4/24). Be sure to get save your emails to another account if you want to keep them! We will hopefully have a solution up shortly.

Posted at: Sat April 20, 2002 - 3:50 PM | Posted by: jbravata

Read before you post!

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Time for another patented Administrator-style rant, I believe.

Everybody needs to read before they post--and that means read the entire thread, not the title or half a post here and there. I don't see why there are eight threads about Warsaw, or four about the chat being rescheduled, or five about how to get into the MSN chat, or a dozen identical replies to the same question in any thread, or...

If everybody would simply read before they posted, we would cut down on the number of redundant questions and more importantly, the number of redundant threads. It's not only annoying, but can be a problem if important information is buried in one thread because another thread on the same topic is the one that gets replied to more often, and of course that leads to the question that was answered in the previous thread.

A thread is precisely that: It is a single line of thought. If there is a thread already out there about what you want to post, post it as a reply in that thread; we don't need a new one.

Please don't make me try to think of a way to deal with redundant threads, because my solution is going to be to delete them without comment. This is the comment.

Thanks in advance for your cooperation,

Jon

Posted at: Thu February 7, 2002 - 4:09 PM | Posted by: jbravata

Member Conduct

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So what's more fun than getting a searing-hot poker shoved through your eye? Oh yes, waking up to posts being reported because members simply can't control themselves. (I'm not angry with those of you who reported the posts, by the by.)

As is the American way, one person has ruined it for the rest of us. Due to the recent spamming escapade, there is now a board-wide 30 second flood control in place. No user may post two posts within thirty seconds of one another. If that's not enough, the time limit will be increased. I'm going to go and give a few users immunity to this, but the vast majority will be under the sphere of its influence. You all know who to thank.

That said, I'm not sure what people think spamming accomplishes. Do you think after I got five reports about the spam and saw 26 threads screwed with that I ran right off to join this girl's fan club? Or even visit her site? Quite contrary.

I've never wanted to do this, but if this is how people are going to act, maybe I simply have to prohibit any advertising of any kind. Wouldn't that be fun? Let's move this board to Nazi Germany because people can't control themselves. That's our next step, but I suspect the people who spam just don't care. Maybe dishing out a handful of server bans will quell the wave. It always surprises people when they tick me off and try to visit the website to find a "404 Forbidden" error pop up on their screen, but with situations like these I take a pleasure in it.

The account of the spammer has been disabled. If it becomes necessary to add a server ban, it shall be done. Anybody else who is thinking about pulling a stunt like that should save us both the time and email me a "please ban me" message in advance.

- A very irate Administrator.

Posted at: Fri December 28, 2001 - 3:40 PM | Posted by: jbravata

Personal Information

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I hate to even have to bring this up again, but I think it is becoming necessary once again.

The administration will absolutely not tolerate giving out anybody's personal information, or the information with which to find such information, on this message board. This includes Billy and his family, as well as other actors, singers, and members of the board. In general, if you do not have their explicit, written permission to distribute such information, don't do it. Threads containing such information will be deleted.

Human beings have a fundamental right to privacy. The law may not protect that right between private citizens on this message board, but the administrators and moderators here will.

Thank you in advance for your cooperation.

Posted at: Thu November 15, 2001 - 10:06 PM | Posted by: jbravata

Profile Information

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I'd like to speak briefly about the information in your profiles for a moment.

The non-optional fields, email and password, must always be kept up to date. The message board enforces that. If you change your email address to something that doesn't exist or you can't get to, your account is rendered useless. When you change your email, the message board changes your password and emails it to the new address you specified. This guarantees that you always give the board a valid email. If you don't want people to see your email (which is the only reason I can see for not wanting to give it), simply check the appropriate checkbox in your profile.

The administrators do NOT have access to your password. It is passed through one-way encryption. If you lose it, it can never be recovered, only changed. Also, the administration will no longer change your password and mail it to you if you forget it, for security reasons. If you need your password, click the "Lost Password" link and it will be changed and emailed to the address in your profile. If that email isn't valid, your account isn't either. The only thing to do is re-register a new account. So, double-check if you're changing your email and make sure there aren't any typos. Your account depends on it.

Jon

Posted at: Sun November 4, 2001 - 3:52 PM | Posted by: jbravata

Questions about the Board

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I am seeing a lot of people ask the same questions over and over. Before you ask for help, check the following:

1. Read the FAQ! That is what it is there for, to answer questions so they don't have to be made in public. The question about avatars ("cartoons", "icons") is answered in there. So is the question about how many posts are required for what level. It also explains how to use smilies (emoticons) and how to change font features.

2. Check the help files. There are more in-depth explanations of a number of features in there, including the emoticon and ScareCrow codes list, as well as explanation on what fields in your profile mean and what some features of the board are.

3. Check the board. Most of the questions that are NOT answered in the FAQ have been answered before.

If people make sure to check to see if their question has already been answered, it will avoid cluttering up the board and avoid the annoyance of other users.

Posted at: Tue September 18, 2001 - 9:24 PM | Posted by: jbravata

Welcome to ScareCrow

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For those who have joined us within the past six months or so, this is going to be something new for you. For the rest, welcome home.

ScareCrow is very similar in both outward function and appearance to Ikonboard, so that, hopefully, your transition will be a smooth and quick one.

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions or concerns, you can email me and I'll try to help you as best I can, as quickly as I can.

Jon

Posted at: Mon September 3, 2001 - 6:45 PM | Posted by: jbravata