History of the Slacktub-Pub, continued

 The day I brain stormed the "Pub" I immediately thought of the theme song from the movie "The Sting" staring Paul Neuman and wanted a short sampling of it as the Slacktub-Pub theme. . . At the time sounds were not very standardized on the web and there was almost no pre-recorded music much less copyright free. Only a few years ago The Entertainer by Scott Joplin was not available and we would have had to recorded it ourselves. Thanks to Wikipedia and user "IE" we have our piano "rag" for the Slacktub-pub 18 years later. Wikipedia says it is a poor performance but I think it is perfect for a bar room piano player.

Registration Issues Due to abuses we had to turn off the "automatic" pub registration and review and setup logins manually. This became a task worse than paying bills or doing taxes and we eventually stopped maintaining registrations. To those that did not get in we are very sorry.

What type of abuses? Multiple logins - so folks could pretend to be more than one person. OR talk to themselves to make a point. . . Then there are spammers. . . if you leave a non moderated forum or chat of any kind open the forum spammers will fill the page full of spam links EVERY DAY.

Moves Or first server that only lasted a couple months was on a small personal account at Lynchburg.net. This was quickly found to be unsatisfactory so we moved to commercial, but still shared account at Circle.net in Asheville NC. This is where Kiwi setup the first version of the Slacktub-Pub. We were there for about five years until they went out of business. The primary tech there started his own business and took the server with anvilfire with him to Atlanta GA and set us back up. With each move to a new server Kiwi setup the Slacktub-Pub again. This new server host was not a totally satisfactory arrangement so Kiwi convinced me to move to his server in New Zealand. By then we were hosting web sites for a number of blacksmithing suppliers and others. The move was a big deal and we carefully planned it in stages. The problem was that most of our users were in the US and the lag time (performance) of the sites was not what it needed to be. So in 2003 after a couple months in New Zealand we moved AGAIN to a big, highly recommended server farm in Ohio called JTLnet.net. We were at JTL for 12 years but had to change servers 4 times due to worn out hard drives! When JTL suddenly went out of business we had to find a new server host. As we made the move I tried to contact Kiwi about setting up the pub ONE more time. . . but he has moved on to other things or did not receive any of my messages. So I found AJAX-Chat and set it up. This is newer and faster but does not have a registration system. . .

And so the Internet goes. . .

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