Forum Status

Due to technical difficulties on my part, the Forum's Newsletters and some of @falshung 's older forgeries links are not accessible at this time. I'll try to restore them as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience.

I just purchased 50,000 page views of ad-free for the forum.

If you sign in to your account, ads will not be displayed; ads will still be displayed when viewing the forum as a Guest (i.e., not signing in).

I'm interested in finding out how long it will take us to reach 50K page views.

You must now sign in to view the Forum's Shoutbox.

An email has been sent to each of the 242 members who have not signed in to their forum accounts since March 31, 2017 or earlier.

These members have been advised that their forum accounts will be disabled if they do not sign in prior to May 1, 2018.

Additionally, if they are in the "New Member" category, they must not only sign in but also post their introduction by that date in order to keep their from being disabled.

Going forward, persons joining our forum will have 30 days in which to create their introductory threads; failure to do so will cause their accounts to be disabled.

Similarly, the accounts of members who have not signed in during the preceding 12 months will also be disabled.

I've just finished deleting the accounts of 224 New Members who joined the forum prior to April 1st of this year who still had not posted their required introductions. Should those individuals desire to rejoin the forum they will have to complete the registration process again.

I will begin to disable the accounts of those individuals whose status is either Member or **Member** that have not signed in to the forum in over one year. This is a somewhat tedious, manual process that will happen as time permits. Should these individuals desire to rejoin the forum they may do so by sending an email request to stampforum DOT net AT gmail DOT com.

Going forward, individuals joining the forum must post their introductions within 30 days or their accounts will be deleted. All are being advised of this requirement in the welcome message they receive upon being accepted for membership.

While our Forum welcomes new members, those individuals who don't wish to participate are still able to view the majority of the forum as guests so there is no reason for them to request membership.

I've removed the "Add Attachment" button from the posting page to eliminate any possible confusion among our membership.

Shortly after the Forum's creation, we reached the attachment limit and decided not to spend any funds purchasing additional storage.

For awareness, I reviewed the ISPs of all of our members over the past few days. Some might be interested to learn that our members have signed in to the forum through ISPs located in 41 different countries; we have members located on every continent except Antarctica.

I've added a new feature for Forum members whose primary language is not English; specifically, Google Translate has been added as a plugin.

To use the feature simply click on the pull-down menu with Google logo at upper left and select the desired language.



If the plugin works as advertised, the pages being viewed should be translated into the selected language.

If you use the feature and encounter problems, please send me a forum personal message describing the issue.

Note that, at times, the translation may only occur for the page being viewed at time of language selection -- in those instances, the process must be repeated for each new page being viewed.

Some may have noticed that the Forum's URL now shows that the site is secure. 

As of February 19th, Proboards has been automatically redirecting forums from HTTP to HTTPS. While this change is a very positive security enhancement, it poses a minor problem for TSF.

Specifically, for a web browser to identify our forum as "secure" (i.e., with the padlock showing before the URL), everything that loads from the forum must be loaded securely over HTTPS.

When visiting a secure webpage, if that page loads an image or other content from a site that is HTTP (not HTTPS), this is not considered secure.

Consequently, your browser may display a message indicating that the site is not fully secure, or the content will simply fail to load.

This latter condition is currently being experienced in posts in which a current or former member has added images that are hosted on an HTTP site -- below was extracted from a post in which images hosted on an HTTP site have failed to load.



Should you come across posts in which the image(s) has failed to load, please report the post so that the Forum's staff can attempt to resolve the issue.

If you are hosting images on your own website, and SSL is not offered through the host, you may be able to obtain a free SSL certificate through a provider such as Cloudfare.

If your host does not offer SSL, please choose to host your images on a site that does support HTTPS -- the TSFImageHost maintains a current SSL certificate and its use for images posted on TSF is recommended.

We've grown since I last showed the site's Google Analytics geographic information so I thought it time for an update. Below is a map showing the geographic locations of those who visited our site during the month of April 2020. Also shown are stats from the 10 countries with the most users during that period.

Most of the listed criteria don't require explanation. The bounce rate is the percentage of users who only viewed a single page on the site. 

The TSF Image Host has been transitioned to the new server -- I still haven't figured out what or how I need to do in the transition's aftermath.

A short time ago, a member asked to see the locations of all of our members. I can't provide that but I am able to show the locations and numbers of individuals accessing the Forum during a given period of time. Below is a graphic showing the geographic locations of individuals, both members and non-members, who accessed the Forum during January 2021. Also shown are some statistics for the 10 countries with the most individuals making access.

For the awareness of those who may have opted not to receive email from the Forum, I just sent the following to the TSF Image Host group:

I've removed the image host from maintenance mode and its registered users should again have access. Thanks for your patience.