[retired]

.....

There's quite a bit of misinformation here, so let me sort things out a bit. Gonna do this in the shortest way possible.

1) A few weeks ago, on 8/21, db.etree increased the security of logins because someone contacted us and explained a security breach he had found, and we fixed it.

2) This temporarily broke logins on bt.etree because the bt site never developed its own user sign up or authentication system. We told Trey, the bt admin who still runs the site, what was done and how to upgrade to bt site to use the new system, but it took something like 3 weeks until 9/14 or so. Y'all saw that, I suspect. No idea why, but Trey has a real life and we all do, too.

3) One side effect of being unable to log in to bt.etree is that you couldn't upload. 'Cause, you need to log in to upload, right? If you were still logged in via your browser and did upload, the torrent wouldn't seed because the site couldn't authenticate the seeder when he did the intiial download. (Or something along those lines. I don't run bt.etree and as you'll see I don't try to fix it.)

4) At the same time, there's something wrong with the bt site. Well, there are lots of things wrong with it, but specifically the seeder/leecher info, which was never really accurate all these years -- you've probably experienced this if you seed there -- stopped updating on the web page itself.

5) Even though the list of peers was being fed to the backend database from the bt tracker, when you went to bt.etree.org the website list of torrents wouldn't update properly because, by default it only shows active seeds, and the website itself couldn't find any active seeds. I don't really understand why, since the database itself works. It's probably the code on the bt.etree website, which really hasn't been meaningfully maintained or updated in 10 or 12 years. Tom and I pointed out what we could and checked with the site host that the database scripts were running with the correct user permissions, etc., but that's about all we could do.

6) On Friday night, 9/14, an old-time etree admin (not Trey) threw a hissy fit when he couldn't fix the bt site. He blamed Tom Anderson and me for these problems, and then decided all on his own that db.etree wouldn't be part of etree any more. Nevermind that the db has been around for 18 years and longer than the bt tracker, and that the ownership of etree.org is a community resource.

7) This person controls the etree.org DNS. And he likes to act out, so he decided to redirect db.etree.org from ibiblio at UNC, where it's hosted, to some other server that's configured to throw an error, with no explanation. If you've seen the "ngnix" message, that's the one. He also put up the various "goodbye" messages that you've seen and the strange login page that does nowhere. This sort of thing has happened before, you may recall if you've been in the community long enough.

8) Nothing has happened to db.etree except that the site won't load anymore because you wind up someplace else. Tom and I will attend to that once UNC dries out a bit from hurricane Florence and they can give us some assistance to solve the DNS problem. Nothing to do but wait. But your list is still there. The db is still there. That's not going to change.

9) As for bt.etree itself, I can't say. It was never really my problem, although lord knows I put a lot of time into supporting site users who couldn't get help from the "server team" over the years. Indeed, that's how I know many of you. In any case, bt is no longer my problem. I hope the site is restored soon, but I can't say because I don't know.

Hope that's useful information. As before, you can reach the db team at [email protected], which hasn't changed all these years. (Babies can't change Google's DNS, you know?).