P4D Blog

Yep--P4D was hacked via brute force. An IP address in the UK, likely a personal computer infected with a bot. We were not home--were spending the night in a hotel in KC to celebrate my birthday and our anniversary (yep--guess I'm crazy--we got married on my 18th birthday!). Anyway, since we were not home and didn't know there was a problem, the scheduled backup process ran and overwrote our backup with the hacker's changes. Just bad timing--had to happen when we weren't home. Even worse timing--now that everything has to be rebuilt, I start back to college in two weeks (finishing my premed biology degree and studying for the MCAT, woohoo!), and my kids also start school for the first time--they've always been homeschooled.

With so much work looming ahead, I think things need to be simplified around P4D. Not only for me in the rebuilding process, but also for users. I think the changes will really benefit us all. Also, in case you haven't noticed, I'm the only admin around here now--Clara is pursuing other ventures, so please don't bother her with P4D stuff! I'm sure she would be happy to help--but it's all my responsibility now, so contact me, we don't need to worry her with it!

Here are some changes I am wanting to make:

FORUM ONLY, NO GALLERY: To simplify, I am playing with the idea of only doing a forum, but having an entire forum section to advertise new products for sale. Instead of uploading your image to a gallery (which takes up mucho space and bandwidth), you will use the forum post tools to post your image right there in your forum post. This will also make the site run faster, with less images to load, and will help me with costs because I changed servers and need to be conservative on space and bandwidth.
You think that would be too much of a hassle, having to use a link to an image instead of uploading an image? Look at it this way--I recommend that you use www.tinypic.com to host your images. FREE! EASY! It generates the link for you, not only in html, but also in bbcode for blogs, forums, etc. So, it would be really handy to use that link in your Yahoo posts as well!
Another advantage to designers--remember how you had to sift through the multitudes of designers and site names when choosing your category to upload to? Also alot of hassle for visitors to find your name in the lists of designers. I never liked that--too much hassle. I'm a hassle-free laid-back kind of girl! Instead, this shopping section of the gallery will be arranged by product type, just like products are in the stores. Here's some cats, feel free to comment and suggest more!

Kits
Ready-Made Pages
Designer Resources
Actions
Multi-Layered Templates
Kit Suites (kits plus ready made pages)
Cards
Templates
Embellishments
Backgrounds
Crafts

I welcome any and all feedback on this--please feel free to post a comment! Also, we lost all P4D mail with the hack, and it was really getting so much spam that I don't want to revisit that--so there will soon be some contact links through the new forum, or you can email me at one of my other email addys--ask around and someone will know one! Thanks!

Andrea