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A Statement From The Webmaster
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 Dear members,
As webmaster of this site, I felt the time had come, to set the record straight for all our users/members that have made the move over to the new site.
I know most of you just want to use the site for what it is but I feel that we need to tell the story so the record is well and truly straight and everybody understands the situation.
The original SCPA site as most of you will remember was an information only website, but with the success of the Croydon site, it was felt that a similar site would be beneficial to Surrey. I personally, really liked the layout of the Croydon site and spoke with Sass about sorting something out for Surrey.
At the time, I did not realise that the layout etc of the site was actually the work of a readily available CMS system that anyone can download for free from www.myphpnuke.com and not owned by UK8ball as we had previously thought. Had we known this at the time, we would have created our own site like this one, a long time ago, as many people on the SCPA Committee were sceptical to say the least of what the use of forums would do to an 'official' SCPA website. After tireless effort from both Marc, Sass and myself, we managed to get acceptance from the committee and set about creating our very own site that allowed you, the members, the opportunity to get involved and have some input into the site as a whole.
Over the past few months, many of you will have seen comments posted on here where Nik Hammond (ProfessorPool) and Marc were not getting along. These comments escalated into more severe emails being sent between both parties and eventually, Nik felt the need to 'flex his muscles' and abuse his power as service provider to suspend our site immediately until the time that Marc was removed from the site admin team.
What Nik hadn't banked on, was that various members of the site had passed comments to us, that this sort of behaviour was 'par for the course' with Nik, and that they felt, it was only a matter of time before this situation occurred and the site was taken down. At a previous meeting, the SCPA agreed for both Marc and myself to create a new site, that mirrored the old site in all the usual ways, but to host it ourselves independent of uk8ball, so if the worst case scenario happened, we could not be held to ransom for all the data that had been added over the past couple of years. I should stress that it was made clear that this new site would only ever be used if the old site was removed by the service provider.
Sadly, yesterday the service provider took the decision to suspend our account for 24 hours because he did not agree with comments that were made responding to one of his posts on our site. He then proceeded to hold a gun to the SCPA Committees head, by instructing us that unless Marc was removed from the site admin team within 24 hours, the site would be shut down permanently.
Nik was given the opportunity to re-instate our original site with the agreement that we would discuss matters once the site was turned back on. He refused. Therefore, he left us NO ALTERNATIVE but to walk away from the UK8ball community and move our site over to the new and improved County site that you can all see and visit today. Nik chose to visit the new site yesterday and continued where he had left off on the old site. The decision was made to remove him from our site as his mere presence was causing issues with other members on the site.
This morning, we have received several 'nasty' emails from Nik with comments in them like 'I'm inviting you to stop it now, or I'll destroy your site. Do you really want me to prove I can do it?' Since then, there have been various attempts to hack into our site from an outside source. Fortunately, the new service provider managed to stop this happening and has notified the authorities of this illegal attempt to gain access to our site.
Therefore, this site has now become a uk8ball free zone and all connections to the aforementioned service provider have been severed. I would like to take this opportunity to thank both Doyley and Buffalo, who have worked very hard in their respective capacities on the old site, our thanks go out to both of them for their efforts over the past couple of years.
We are currently working very hard behind the scenes to get any bugs and problems fixed that have arisen due to the fact that it was a rather rushed opening ceremony, but if you find any issues or you have any questions you wish to ask us about the situation or the new site, please feel free to PM either Marc or myself and we will be happy to put your minds at rest.
I wanted this time to speak to everybody, purely because I personally feel very bad about the situation. We were happy to be a part of his community but we were not prepared to be bullied around by somebody that has little or no bearing on pool in Surrey as a whole.
I hope this message finds its way to the users of the UK8ball community and more so, the hard working webmasters of the many other individual sites that go to make up that community that Nik relies on. I accept that there will be many of them, that are more than happy with their own sites and I understand and accept that, but, if the time arises where they are not happy with the situation, I would want them to know, that there is life after uk8ball as we are now living proof of this and if any webmasters want some advise on starting their own site, once again, please feel free to contact any of this site's admin team. Who knows, we could even find ourselves with our own community in years to come.
For our members, we welcome you to the new site and hope you have many hours of fun trawling through all our tables, statistics and history of the S.C.P.A. that could have been so easily lost.
Thanks for your time,
Yours in sport,
Martin Lambert
OneTrueWarrior
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Site News
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Comments
by Burn on Wednesday, May 23 2007 @ 17:24:07 BST
(User Info)
Spot on, slight clarification on one thing, no-one tried to hack into the site as such, it was a DoS (Denial of Service) attack on our webhosts servers, specifically targetted at this domain.
Read the rest of this comment...