Cyberpunk Review » My Deepest Apologies for the Past Two Months

Ghost in the Shell Screen Capture

My deepest apologies, everyone. I’ve basically done nothing with the site these past two months. If not for Mr. Roboto, truly nothing would have been posted. Why, you ask? I wish I had a good reason, but the truth is I just sorta got overwhelmed with everything. Just briefly, in real life, I’m an independent consultant, which is sort of a boom-bust business. I now have full-time job in addition to two part-time jobs. On top of this I have a son who entered high school this year (I won’t bother you with the side issues associated with this). Bottom line, I feel really shitty leaving this site fallow. I wish I could come up with a better excuse, but truly, life just got in the way. As Neo was once told, I sort of decided (through behavior versus any real decision) that I just needed to unplug for a while. I’ve done no IMs, threaded discussions or the rest for the past good while (I basically immersed myself into paranormal fantasy books).

Making this worse, one of the site’s plugins, “Bad Behavior” blocked me and everyone else from making contributions, and me personally from making edits to the site (including cleaning out the trash comments). I finally got in and disabled this. Other issues include:

1. Lost comments: Sometimes you make a comment, but it doesn’t show up. Why? Usually the reason is due to an issue with an outdated template for the reviews I used for the first year of the site. When I switched out of it, I later found out I needed to go to every review posted on this site to get rid of a bunch of background code. Bottom line, the HTML is hosed in places. So your comment isn’t lost - it just isn’t showing up right now.

2. Spam spam spam spam spam: God, I hate this shit. I’m not going to go to a login model, ’cause that sucks. Perhaps a better option is for me to recruit a couple of you long-time contributors and give you admin rights so that you can help out with the policing when I’m not around. The Bad Behavior plugin doesn’t seem to be the answer, so I’ll be looking for others.

3. Change of ISP: While I don’t think there are any access issues, my latest ISP change has not worked out. I left a “cpanel” enabled site for a home-grown back-end. I ended up losing my ability to do refined stats and a bunch of other things. I will hopefully be finding a new site and moving it in my immense amount of spare time.

I spent yesterday soaking up Blade Runner “Final Cut” and all the associated extras (what a great great transfer, ey?). I think I’ve got my groove back, although the test will be whether or not you see a string of entries from me. I plan on doing this, but also have to do a bunch of background shit above - part of which got me down in the first place. I also have about a month’s worth of email to catch up on (if you think the spam is bad on this site, just try my CPR email account!).

So again, my deepest apologies to you all.

~SFAM~

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Comments

Welcome back SFAM! I don’t think any apologies are neccesary after what you describe, you were swamped with work so it’s understandable.

And the Final Cut disk set is pretty amazing, isn’t it? Dangerous Days was impressive, and you have to hit “play all” with the cut footage to watch it as an alternate version.

Hey man, I’d love to help you out with the site if you think I’ve been around long enough.

no worries. we all get bogged down. besides, i have you on my newsreader so if you post i see it - and if you don’t, well i just die a little.

That last anonymous comment was from me, I can be a noob sometimes.

Welcome back SFAM and I wish the best success for your son.

you shouldn’t feel like you have to apologies every time you take a month or two off from updating the site. We’ve all got our “real” lives going on, you know. Totally love the site for what it is. Keep up the good stuff, if you can* xo

Vim Crony

It doesn’t matter much that you were gone, as long as you’re back.
Shit happens to everyone’s lives that distract us from whatever we wish we could be doing, don’t worry about it!

Ya, no need for apologies, we’re just glad you didnt end up in one of Creedy’s black bags (yeah, so i quote movies too much) but either way welcome back

Hi guys, thanks for all the great comments. And “Anonymous”, I’m guessing you haven’t been on that long. But, um, Cadet SF, absolutely! Drop me an email.

I just found this site a few days ago so I did not know there had been trouble. If you need help with the site, I’d love to help.

Great to hear that you’re back, you were definitely missed.

Hi Aaron, welcome to Cyberpunk Review. I was thinkin of giving you admin rights ’till I went to your site and noticed you liked AVP-R.

Just kidding. You have a cool site there. Hang around here a while and we’ll see. I’ve definitely looking for more contributors, even if I do finally get my shit together and start posting regularly again.

Well, dude! Family is more important than some site on the intertubes. Make sure you enjoy it.

Also, I hope you have learned your lesson to leave people who can fix things when you disappear.

Happy whatever it is you celebrated, if applicable.

PS. can I has cheesy mod powers too ?

As for dealing with spam, just try an image word. The word doesn’t actually have to ever change: it could be NEO every time, and generally the spam bots are too dumb to ever figure it out.

Hi anon, image words don’t really work that well. More importantly, I personally hate them. I will find a solution for this though. I LOVE the solution on the forums - the Are You Human question is really the thing I’d like to find for Wordpress.

Still, you our cyberpunk hero, SFAM.
I fully understand your need of “need of unplug” for while.
Good luck - both in real life and in site administration

Cyperpunk Review makes me wet….Wait a minute that was far too direct. Ah screw it I’m too lazy to press delete.

Welcome back.

Hey SFAM it’s good to have you back. You have created the absolute best cyberpunk website on the net, I have enjoyed posting here and have made CPR my first visit when I get online. All that being said, you shoudn’t feel the need to apologize because you had to take care of RL stuff. We all understand and as you can see from the above comments, we all are here to support you. Best of luck to you and your family.

Hey, RL happens. lol
Glad to have ya back.

Well SFAM, as I am a bad ‘poster’ I am a very good reader, and I am always waiting a new post, and well, everything is forgiven while this great site doesnt die! Long life to cyberpunkreview! yeeeehaaaaa!!

Hi, glad to see you back, and I love the site. On the subject of spam, maybe installing a captcha system ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha ) might do the trick? Just an idea.

Oh shit I thought you were a robot or ARCPRO (Autonomous Robotic Cyberpunk Reviewing Organism).

Ah well sucks to be you