Catholic Online Forum

Well, that was a long outage. Glad the forum is up again.

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Grace

As to the past, let us entrust it to God's mercy, the future to Divine Providence. Our task is to live holy the present moment. - Saint Gianna Molla

It works! *happy dance*

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Line

"I can do anything through Christ crucified, for I know truly that He does not lay a heavier load on His creatures than they can bear."
~ St. Catherine of Siena

Our Father does not inspire us to do what cannot be done

If I had any hair left I would have pulled it out.

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Bob C

JMJ

Really missed it! Thanks to those who workedhard to get us back up!

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Peace.. Mary Jo
They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles (Isiah 40:32)

What the heck happened?

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Andrew McAllister

Respect for the dignity of every innocent human being from conception/fertilization, without exception, without compromise, without apology.

I haven't been in here in ages; I haven't been a regular participant. I've been focusing on other things - I live with a chronic illness I've been writing a self help book about.

But - the Pope resigns - hey, I scurried in here huckly buckly - or at least tried to! I was met with a blank page, which was pretty scary, followed by, just now, the usual forum front page. What a relief! I hope for all you regulars that it hasn't been down too long!

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Kerrie

Habemus Forum!



What color smoke do we send up for that? Hmmm, what color smoke does fried microchips make?

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Rob

Me too.

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Daniel

"Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division." -- Luke 12:51

It was hacked.
Five or six days. It was terrible.

By the way, the back-up meeting place is a Face Book group here: http://www.facebook.com/groups/148113525227129/
It's open to everybody.


LOL

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Grace

As to the past, let us entrust it to God's mercy, the future to Divine Providence. Our task is to live holy the present moment. - Saint Gianna Molla

Even more crucial in an outage, it's a place to get and share information about the status of the forum.

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Jeff Stevens

The most encouraging aspect of the restoration of the forum is that it shows COL's commitment to keeping the forum up and running. That is very encouraging to me, after the departure of our primary technical liaison.

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Jeff Stevens

Thank you God and whoever the responsible humans are.

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Valerie Garcia
vals1990@yahoo.com

"Listen, O my son, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart, and cheerfully receive and faithfully execute the admonitions of thy loving Father, that by the toil of obedience thou mayest return to Him ....." St. Benedict

That is encouraging, yes

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Bob C

Unfortunately it requires a FB Log In which some of us refuse to establish. Personal problem, I know.

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BobA

I agree completely with BobA. FB requires personal info to get access and the promised privacy is difficult to establish and not very stable anyway - all the rule shifting.

I tried an email to forumsysop but received no response. Catholic.org was up and running but the forum link just got the blank page. Couldn't catholic.org at least have a home page notification or a link to a "forum down" notification?

Btw, in poking around trying to figure out what was going on, I noticed that Google had a link to an obviously salacious site under one of its forum.catholic.org hits.

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Kent Wendler

My FB account for COL is fake, fake name and everything. I may put some real pictures up but nobody I know will be on there. I have confusing fake names. I didn't intend that fake FB for COL but it ended up that way and the last name on that is one fake name, the last name here is another fake name and my fake Val e-mail has yet another last name. I have identity issues.

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Valerie Garcia
vals1990@yahoo.com

"Listen, O my son, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart, and cheerfully receive and faithfully execute the admonitions of thy loving Father, that by the toil of obedience thou mayest return to Him ....." St. Benedict

I have a COL email that will unfortunately be sometimes down when the forum is.

For those of you not keen on FB for the status of the forum when it is down, you can email me at ianndc@hotmail.com for updates.

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Ian DC
Blessed Ever Virgin Mary -- Sanctuary and resting-place of the Blessed Trinity where God dwells in greater and more divine splendour than anywhere else in the universe

I assume you are aware that you are identified by your computer IP address? The fake names and aliases we all use only serve to give us a "face" on the internet. If someone wanted to target you for malware, tracking, advertising or any other purpose they would use your IP address. Jeff might correct some of that.

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BobA

I missed the forum, too. I joined the FB group, my name is different on there than it is here. Though, you all got me thinking I should make a fake facebook using my MaryB name

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Judas was the first to leave mass early

Bob A,

Yes, but I assume that is a risk with the internet in general but perhaps I'm wrong. My e-mail addresses are at risk but again, I assume that's just the risk of the internet. None of my e-mails have real information but I think I understand what you're saying.

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Valerie Garcia
vals1990@yahoo.com

"Listen, O my son, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart, and cheerfully receive and faithfully execute the admonitions of thy loving Father, that by the toil of obedience thou mayest return to Him ....." St. Benedict

Mary B,

My only purpose in having a fake FB for COL is that I have a different personality than in real life and don't want my COL friends to be horrified. My other friends and priests are used to being horrified. Otherwise, I would have gone on with my real name and picture.

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Valerie Garcia
vals1990@yahoo.com

"Listen, O my son, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart, and cheerfully receive and faithfully execute the admonitions of thy loving Father, that by the toil of obedience thou mayest return to Him ....." St. Benedict

I'm glad the forum is back, thank you to those who worked to re-instate it.

I notice that in Google and Bing there is no longer the notice 'this site may be compromised'. I'd been seeing that for a while.

chris kirk

All,

A Google search on "Catholic Online Forum" alerted me that the site had been hacked and was damaged.

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James Daly

"It is the Lord." (Jn 21:7)

I do not use my real name on any of the message boards/forums that I go to. Facebook is the only one that has my real name and I keep most everything private on Facebook--or as private as Facebook allows you to be.

When my daughter was young and I went online I was an overprotective mom who didn't want anyone to track down my precious little girl and I never posted pictures of her online. I rarely post a picture of my now adult daughter online at a site I've gone to for over 10 yrs which is mostly a group of people who have been there that long and it's a paid membership (not a lot of money, but enough to keep people from lurking around, the money goes to pay for the site so we don't mind paying a small amount).

So while I am not trying to keep my identity a secret, I rather not give out too much identifying information.

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Judas was the first to leave mass early

I simply put no more out there than I have to. I do subscribe to three Catholic forums but no other social sites and I have no doubt I have used trigger words for the government bots to flag.

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BobA

In further praise of this forum, I checked out others while 'jonesing' for this one. But while I found some as mature and sober, our forum is the most readable and uncluttered-looking *by far*. IMHO.
More kudos to the designers.

chris kirk

What other sites? I'm curious.

CAF forums can be useful, but there is so much "pop-theology" there without reference that it is difficult somtimes to find the signal in the noise.

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Jeff Stevens

Every site you go to, and many you don't (because it routes through them) know your IP address. There are two challenges there:

1) Your IP address changes sometimes. So it can be hard for a site to know. But really, if they see a login to account XYZ from IP address 1.2.3.4, they know that XYZ is at 1.2.3.4. If they see it for a month or so, they can be reasonably certain that 1.2.3.4 is that user's IP at home or work or something.
2) The IP address can't be traced to a particular NAME, only to an account. That is, Catholic Online has no idea if IP address 1.2.3.4 belongs to Jeff Stevens or John Smith. They only know it belongs to Kardinal, who CLAIMS to be Jeff Stevens.
3) Your ISP knows every web site you go to, and can sometimes know your account name, but only if you log in without SSL (the lock you see on the web site). 95% of sites, including Facebook and NOT including COL, use SSL to encrypt their logins. So your ISP can know your COL username AND PASSWORD without much difficulty. They CANNOT know your Facebook login name.

The short version is this. If you choose to have a "Read Only" Facebook account like Val does, using something other than her real name, Facebook has no way of knowing whether it's your real name or not. You just sign up with a fake name, "Friend" a bunch of people, join some groups, and never fill in any informaiton about yourself or say anything about yourself. Facebook would know nothing about you except that someone who claims his name is John Smith is logging in from IP address 4.3.2.1.

Your ISP would know you're going to Facebook, but that's all. HOWEVER, if Facebook AND your ISP got together and correlated the data they have...login to Facebook at this time on this date from this IP to this account...then they'd have real information about you. This has not been done to anyone's knowledge. No ISP has ever given up personally identifying information to anyone about what IP they log in from without a subpoena, at least that I'm aware of.

So Bob, I'd feel reasonably safe making a Facebook account just to keep up with goings on on COL if and when it goes down again. If you're concerned, just use a fake name.

Me? I live pretty much in public. You can assemble a remarkable dossier on me if you wanted to by being my FB friend and knowing two places I like to hang out on the Internet, here and one other forum. This does not worry me. I'm not worth stalking for any reason, by government, corporation, or individual.

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Jeff Stevens

That's a lot of interesting information, thanks Jeff. Something for me to consider.

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BobA