I will be out of town from February 3 through February 6 and will most likely not be near a computer. Please be patient if you are a new user and sign up for an account, as I cannot guarantee the usual turnaround. I apologize in advance for the inconvenience.
Hello everybody! Assistantsinfrance.com has grown from a wee little personal project to a site with over 6,000 members. Winter is "down time" for the site while new assistants feel a bit more settled in their jobs and new assistants have yet to apply to the program. For current assistants, please check back from time to time to help out those who are thinking of becoming assistants in the forums -- pass the torch and help others as you were helped about this time last year.
I have recently moved back to the US and am working on job prospects and a move. While I will continue to maintain the site (and the moderators do their thang in the forums), please keep in mind that turnaround on emails and requests may not be as quick as usual.
In the meantime, happy holidays to everyone, no matter which side of the ocean you're on! We woke up to over 8 inches of snow this morning, so it certainly feels festive around here...
After a decent two-week stint with very little free time and even less internet access, I am back online. I have activated all new accounts requested during my absence, and I am just now starting in on the more recent members. Please drop me an additional email if you think I accidently deleted your request. If you have been waiting more than 48 hours for activation, you most certainly got lost in the shuffle. I don't think I left anyone else, but just in case...
Also, judyb has stepped down as moderator in the forums. She has been enormously helpful over the last few years and I appreciate everything she has done for this site. Please stop sending her emails, now. :) Thanks again, Judy!
Just a note to let everyone know that I am in the middle of a move and will not be able to respond to emails and activation requests in the usual 24-48 hour turnaround. I should be back online and a bit more settled by October 16. Thanks in advance for your patience.
To register to post in the forums, user the "Register" link in the upper-right hand corner any of the forums pages. Alternatively, click here.
After registering, drop me an email containing your USERNAME so that I can activate your account quickly. Please do not forget to send me your USERNAME. Remember: I need your username.
I do this site on a volunteer basis and on my own time, so I apologize if your account isn't activated immediately... I check my email and work on this site when time permits.
Thanks!
As new members are getting their letters, registration is really picking up. If you would like to become a member, please register first, and then send me an email with your username so that I can activate your account as quickly as possible. I am getting over 100 registrations per day (about 90-95 of which are spam), and it is impossible for me to go mining through them one by one. The best option is to respond to your registration email, with "Please activate my account" (or something to that effect) in the subject line. I check my email daily, so account activation shouldn't normally take more than 24-48 hours, as long as I receive an email with a username in it.
I am sorry for the inconvenience but it is the only way we can keep the boards spam-free. It is worth it in the long run!
Over the years, I have been asked about putting up a donation button on the site on several occasions. For some reason, I have always been opposed to it. I suppose it was because I was an assistant myself, I know how tricky it can be to live on an assistant salary, and I generally felt weird about taking money from people for doing something that I enjoy (running this site).
However, I haven't been an assistant for the last two years. I see the value in keeping this site alive, as I know lots of current and future assistants benefit from it. With the increase in spamming and the need to require admin approval of new accounts, my workload has increased at the same time my enthusiasm has waned. I am still happy to see the site is lively and gaining new members, but I myself am no longer in the assistant circuit and therefore have less interest in the goings-on in the forums. So I feel a little more justified in asking for donations, but please only give if you feel I deserve it.
I pay all of the server costs out of my own pocket (now at a reasonable $16/month) and I have for the past four years. The occasional donation will help offset the costs in the way I was hoping Google Ads would -- and it would definetly motivate me to keep the site up and running.
Thanks in advance to anyone who donates.
For those of you who are new to the site, I now require admin approval of registrations. This means that when you sign up for the site, there will be a 24-48 hour period before you can post any messages, the time I will need to approve the account you created. We had such an onslaught of spam that this became the only way to fight it.
The problem is that I get between 10 and 50 new accounts per day, 95% of which are spammers'. If you create a new account and want it activated as soon as possible, drop me a an email alongside your registration, providing your username. It should speed up the approval process.
Also, if it seems to take FOREVER to get your account approved, be sure to contact me about it. I have been known to delete genuine accounts because I have assumed they were made by spammers.
Thanks!
As part of the ongoing battle to fight spam, I have implemented something that modifies registrations. If any new users run into problems registering, please contact me by email. I have tested everything out and it appears to work, but you never know...
Judy and I have been fighting the spammers like crazy, but they are determined types. Hopefully this new adjustment will help some.
We're starting anew. GoogleAds are coming back. I'm not saying anything about them this time around, but they should be popping up in a day or two. Please let me know if you notice anything strange or if their placement is off.
Thanks!
Just an update to warn everybody that I'm going to be travelling around India for the next couple of weeks, so if there's a problem or you email me about something, it will most likely take a lloooonnnngg time to get taken care of. I'm sure there are plenty of internet cafes around the country, but I'm not planning on spending my trip updating this web site. So, my apologies in advance for any problems that might come up. Worst case scenario, you'll have to wait until September for a response.
In the meantime, enjoy your last few days in your home country and good luck preparing for your time in France!
The forums are back up and running. There's good news and bad news about the hacker festival we had around here today (July 11). The bad news is that I am still working on a permanent fix. It could happen again -- but hopefully in the next 24 hours there will be something up preventing these kinds of attacks permanently.
The good news is three-fold:
1. It's over for now. Happy posting.
2. The attack was a file-based attack and not a database attack, which means that all of your private info is secure (emails, etc) and that you have nothing to fear. This site is highly protected and my host takes security very seriously. The attack today only affected the index file, which the hackers took over to cause a redirect to their own site. Their motives - other than just causing general uproar - are still unknown.
3. You guys are really into this web site. I'm happy to see the love. You have no idea how many emails I received about this before I even got home to check my messages. Glad to see you are all on top of the game, and that the site is like a drug for you. ;)
Anyway, again, my apologies for the blip in the system. From a developer's standpoint, hackers and the "work" they do is fascinating. Seems they're always one step ahead of the game. From a user's perspective, not so much. They're just annoying.
I'll let you know what the forum developers say about all of this. Honestly, they were quite confused, as I am running the most recent version with all of the standard security measures in place. So this was a new-ish development for them, and we'll see what unfolds as a result.
Well, clearly the forums have been hacked. It will get solved. Please be patient. Sorry about this... you know how sneaky these people can be.
Just hold on tight. Site should be back up soon.
The new and improved assistantsinfrance.com site!
After switching the program we use to run the forums, I decided to take advantage of the overhaul and re-do the main pages of the site. This means I can entirely clear out the old program being used to run assistantsinfrance.com (Mambo), which will free up a lot of space on my server. Good news, too, because over 2,000 assistants and their almost 30,000 forum posts can start to add up.
A few things to note:
The forums
The forums are open and all users who signed up with the old forums should be able to login. If you have a problem with this, please contact me by email. Thus far, only two or three people have had issues, so the switchover has been fairly seamless.
Moderators
I'm looking for people willing to moderate forums for any given amount of time. You decide how long. Moderating means a few things: moving topics to proper categories, editing double posts, having "moderator" appear next to your name in the forums. Moderators are in charge of specific forums. So, for example, if you are always reading the "Assistant Lounge," maybe you'd be willing to keep it organized and respectable by moderating it. Contact me if you're into the idea.
Member database
The old site had a member database. Do you want it back? We can keep it if you prefer it to the user groups in the forums. Your call.
Links
I'm going to work to bring in the links from the old site into this new one, and then have a few pages of useful links broken down for everybody. If you have any link suggestions, or if you want to be a doll and just whip up a link list (with a name for the link and a corresponding URL) then I would be more than happy to post it.
Suggestions!!!!
Please contact me with your suggestions!! I'm in the dark unless I get feedback, and I read and respond to every email I get. I do all this web stuff as a hobby (I know, I know...), so don't get too high-tech on me, but send me your ideas.
Ok... that's it. Thanks for roughing it through a few days of adjustment.