Service Disruption -

Dec 2017 - Mar 2018

Initial Announcement - 14 Dec 2017

Reluctantly, we have taken the decision to temporarily suspend The Reeves Project wiki with effect from 18h45GMT on 13 December 2017. We will advise via this page our progress to restore the service, but its likely to take us a few weeks, not days.

Two weeks ago (28 November) we had what we first thought was a simple technical issue. But further investigation revealed that Barry's administrative access to the server hosting TRP had been hijacked. Having regained control, Barry removed a couple of static web pages which the intruders had added to the web server (not to the wiki). As far as we can tell the wiki and its contents were not compromised.

Then on Saturday 9 December, the layout of our web pages suddenly changed. The site had been hijacked for a second time and again Barry had been locked out. The intruders had again added a couple of static web pages, which would not be seen by the TRP user community. After a little searching Jonathan found a web page detailing how to hijack any TikiWiki (TW) based service running on or below a specific version of the TW software. Sadly our wiki was running on an affected version.

The server hosting TRP has given us very good service over a very long period of time, but now really needs a major refresh. Since we have no way to prevent repeated hijacking events which may have more serious impact to our wiki content and/or visitors to our web pages, we have reluctantly decided the only safe option is to temporarily suspend The Reeves Project wiki.

Over the coming days and weeks, we look to move TRP to a more secure server and upgrade the whole of the supporting infrastructure, including the TikiWiki software. Right now we don't know how long this activity might take, particularly as the Christmas holiday season is rapidly approaching and everybody's free time is in short supply. We'll aim to report progress here on a regular basis, every two or three weeks. So please do check back here regularly.

Added by Admin Martin on Wednesday 13 December 2017 at 18h45GMT/13h45EST

Updated by Admin Martin on Thursday 14 December 2017 at 16h30GMT/11h30EST

Status Update - 14 Jan 2018

As previously advised, we had reluctantly taken the decision to temporarily suspend The Reeves Project wiki with effect from 13 December 2017. We were able to make little significant progress prior to the New Year, but things are now moving forward. However, it is likely to still take us a few more weeks to get TRP back online.

We've split the challenges facing us in two parts; (1) establishing the new server platform and (2) upgrading from TikiWiki (TW) v6.7

Barry is focused on establishing a new platform to host TRP, which will probably be with a new hosting provider. We will however retain the same domain name of TheReevesProject[dot]org. This is currently the less pressing of our two challenges.

Jonathan and Martin are working to understand the issues with upgrading the TRP wiki from version 6.7 of the TikiWiki (TW) software.

The first step was to prove that the database backup which we have is good. They have achieved this by running it privately (off web) with TW v6.7. (It has to be off web to avoid it being hijacked again.)

They have subsequently turned their attention to upgrading the TW software to version which is stable and will be supported for some time to come. On 12 January we achieved a significant milestone in creating an off web copy of TRP running with TW v15.5. Whilst it is working, it is "ugly". There have been various changes in the TikiWiki software between versions 6 and 15 and some of these are causing issues for us. We will work to identify and address the major issues. This will probably take a week or two.

Once we've addressed the major issues, we'll then take a tentative step to bring a version of TRP back to the web for further review and testing by a slightly wider audience. When we're ready for that next step we'll post an update asking for helpers at https://sites.google.com/site/thereevesproject123/ and the various other channels Beverly is using to keep folks informed.

Added by Admin Martin on Sunday 14 January 2018 at 12h40GMT/07h40EST

Status Update - 02 Feb 2018

As previously advised, we had reluctantly taken the decision to temporarily suspend The Reeves Project wiki with effect from 13 December 2017. In the past two and a half weeks since the last update we've made some good progress but also suffered a couple of knock-backs.

Work with the upgraded copy of TRP has made good progress. A large number of issues (50+ and counting) caused by the upgrade have been identified. Many are little more than cosmetic, but a handful are pretty fundamental to the way TRP works. The good news is that we have already worked out how to fix or work around the vast majority of those issues.

Our efforts to bring TRP back to the internet have faired less well. The environment within a domain we'd previously used for testing has proved to be incompatible with the requirements of the version of TikiWiki we're now expecting to use. This has delayed our plans to seek your help for the next stage of testing by about a fortnight. We have identified our new preferred hosting provider and are awaiting their responses to a couple of technical queries prior to opening an account with them. We will then be ready to start to build a new test environment for TRP.

The Rootsweb email list Reeves-L was one of many communication channels Beverly has been using to keep you informed about our progress. We recently learnt that Ancestry, the custodians of the Rootsweb email lists, had suspended all of their email lists whilst they resolve some issues. See "Update: January 25, 2018" at https://lists.rootsweb.ancestry.com/index/surname/r/reeves.html

To make good this gap in our communications channels, we've created a new Google Group, TheReevesProject123, which we will use to keep you advised by email of our progress to bring TRP back online. If you are already a community member of The Reeves Project, you should have received an invitation to join a new Google Group called TheReevesProject123. If you have yet to accept your invitation, please do it now. Google restricts the validity of those invitations to seven days, and the first batch were issued on 30Jan. We'll advised how non TRP members can join this group in a week or so via our Google Site (see below), if it works as well we expect.

Thank you for your continued patience and please continue to check to https://sites.google.com/site/thereevesproject123/ for the very latest news about our progress in restoring TRP.

Added by Admin Martin on Friday 02 February 2018 at 17h15GMT/12h15EST

Status Update - 22 Feb 2018

As previously advised, we had reluctantly taken the decision to temporarily suspend The Reeves Project wiki with effect from 13 December 2017. At last we are able to report that we've made some positive progress since the last update.

Our enquires of the preferred hosting provider mentioned in the previous update eventually revealed that the level of control we need over the environment in which TRP runs wasn't available with their budget priced hosting plans. When they indicated a plan costing over USD70 per month, we politely said "no thank you". We already had a second choice of hosting provider in mind and were able to very quickly establish a new web presence for TRP with them. This new version of TRP still needs a lot of technical work done before it will be ready for general usage.

To use a real world analogy, TRP is moving home. We've rented new accommodation in the city (hosting provider) we're moving to. But its three weeks until the school term finishes and we need to continue to pay the rent on our current home as well. And then there are the various utility companies to deal with. We've told the postal service when to start re-directing our letters but who knows how well that will work in the first few days. The phone is on at our new home, but when we call our friends they are confused because our new number appears on their handset, not the name they've stored against our old number. And our friends can't look up our new telephone number as the phone company has yet to update their public database.

I suspect most of us have been in this situation at some time in our lives. And its exactly where TRP is at the moment. But for TRP an even better analogy might be relocating to another region or country. Before we moved TRP "spoke" version 6.7 of the underlying TikiWiki software. In our new city, we have to speak version 15.5 to be understood.

To continue with the new home utilities example, yesterday (21 Feb 2018) the postal service made their first collection of mail from our new address and immediately started delivering those messages to you. We send all our mail with the name "admin[at]TheReevesProject[dot]org" but as yet the public indexes of who lives where haven't yet been updated to reflect TRP's new home. So when your e-mail provider looks up TRP in the directory (DNS), they find a mis-match between our new street address (IP address) and the registered address for TRP. This is one of the many things we're working to get fixed.

Now if you happen to have an alert (known as a watch) set on one of the pages we've already updated for TW15.5, the email notification you received may have been flagged as potential spam. It wasn't; we'll get our new home in order as quickly as we can. If you did receive one of those notifications yesterday, you'll now have sufficient information to log-on to the new TRP. Please don't, the house is still a mess and we're not yet ready for visitors. We'll announce a house warming party, when everybody is welcome, as soon as we can.

And before that house warming party, we'll need a few invited friends to come round and help out ... we'll post more about that in a few days at https://sites.google.com/site/thereevesproject123/

Added by Admin Martin on Thursday 22 February 2018 at 14h10GMT/09h10EST

Status Update - 10 Mar 2018 - Help Wanted

We're continuing to make good progress in getting the new version of The Reeves Project's wiki ready for general use. As we've been fixing the issues, we've been checking various wiki pages. But so far we've only looked at a very small proportion of the over 8000 pages. To make sure we're not missing any other significant issues, we now need to get a few more people involved in reviewing wiki pages.

To help out you don't need to be an IT geek. But you will need to be comfortable working with multiple browser tabs open at the same time and be comfortable copying and pasting data into a spreadsheet. We've created a wiki page which will allocate you three random wiki pages which you'll be asked to review as both a logged in community member and then as an anonymous (logged out) individual. Don't worry, we do NOT want you to fix any issues you may uncover, simply report them. It turns out most of the issues we've found so far affect multiple wiki pages and can often be fixed by a system wide search and replace.

We estimate it will take a new reviewer less than 10 minutes to complete one review cycle. As you gain experience, we think the process will take less than 5 minutes per cycle, unless every page you're allocated is riddled with bugs (which we're not expecting!) The process we've defined is very detailed, because we wanted everybody to feel they can help out, if they follow the script. Its a lot of words to read, but the underlying process is relatively simple; copy some automatically generated data about your browser into our spreadsheet, open three allocated wiki pages, copy and paste the urls of those pages into the spreadsheet, then review each page and record your assessment of that page.

In the first instance we need volunteers who access TRP using either a Windows PC or a Mac computer. If you only use a tablet (such as an iPad or Kindle Fire) or smart phone, then sorry but you won't be able to help at this stage. If you can spare an average of an hour or so per day for the next week and you'd like to volunteer to help, then please send an e-mail to TheReevesProject123 [at] gmail [dot] com with your name, your initials and say if you use a Windows PC or a Mac. We'll aim to contact you with a few days with more information.

Thank you.

Added by Admin Martin on Saturday 10 March 2018 at 10h15GMT/05h15EST

Status Update - 27 March 2018 - Controlled Service Resumption

We are please to announce that The Reeves Project (TRP) Wiki is now back online and its content is available to browse via https://thereevesproject.org/data/tiki-index.php?page=HomePage_Wiki. We'll need to monitor things over the next few days and for the moment our Community Members won't be able to log in.

We'll be contacting them on a phased basis over the coming days to give them access.

Added by Admin Martin on Tuesday 27 March 2018 at 19h10BST/14h10EDT

Status Update - 04 April 2018 - Controlled Service Resumption (update 1)

We'll be contacting them on a phased basis over the coming days to give them access.

If the email address you used when you registered with TRP begins with the letter A or B you have already been sent an e-mail with five simple questions to answer. Please make sure you check your spam/junk mail folder. If you use email filtering software, please make sure our domain TheReevesProject.org is not being blocked.

And we'll continue to post new status updates first here at https://sites.google.com/site/thereevesproject123/

Thank you

Updated by Admin Martin on Tuesday 04 April 2018 at 12h50BST/07h50EDT

Status Update - 07 April 2018 - Controlled Service Resumption (update 2)

We'll be contacting them on a phased basis over the coming days to give them access.

If the email address you used when you registered with TRP begins with the letter A, B or C you have already been sent an e-mail with five simple questions to answer. Please make sure you check your spam/junk mail folder. If you use email filtering software, please make sure our domain TheReevesProject.org is not being blocked.

And we'll continue to post new status updates first here at https://sites.google.com/site/thereevesproject123/

Thank you

Updated by Admin Martin on Saturday 07 April 2018 at 09h00BST/04h00EDT

Status Update - 09 April 2018 - Controlled Service Resumption (update 3)

As previously announced The Reeves Project (TRP) Wiki came back online on 27 March and its content is available to browse via

https://thereevesproject.org/data/tiki-index.php?page=HomePage_Wiki.

We are continuing to slowly open TRP up to more and more of our community members. As of 12h00BST on 9 April we've had 29 users login at least once since we announced the relaunch on 27 March. That's just under 10% of our total registered members.

All existing community members whose email address begins with the letter A to I (inclusive) has now been sent an email "Invitation to Rejoin". You will need to respond to find out how to log in to TRP. We'll reach out to the remainder over the coming week or so.

Please make sure you check your spam/junk mail folder. If you use email filtering software, please make sure our domain TheReevesProject.org is not being blocked.

We have also started to register new members.

We will continue to post updates at https://sites.google.com/site/thereevesproject123/

Thank you

Updated by Admin Martin on Monday 09 April 2018 at 12h45BST/07h45EDT

Status Update - 17 April 2018 - Controlled Service Resumption (update 4)

As previously announced The Reeves Project (TRP) Wiki came back online on 27 March and its content is available to browse via

https://thereevesproject.org/data/tiki-index.php?page=HomePage_Wiki.

All existing community members whose email address begins with the letter A to R (inclusive) has now been sent an email "Invitation to Rejoin". You will need to respond to that e-mail find out how to log in to TRP. We'll reach out to the remainder over the coming days.

Please make sure you check your spam/junk mail folder. If you use email filtering software, please make sure our domain TheReevesProject.org is not being blocked.

We have also started to register new members.

We will continue to post updates at https://sites.google.com/site/thereevesproject123/

Thank you

Updated by Admin Martin on Tuesday 17 April 2018 at 17h45BST/12h45EDT

Status Update - 28 April 1028 - Controlled Service Resumption (update 5)

As previously announced The Reeves Project (TRP) Wiki came back online on 27 March and its content is available to browse

via https://thereevesproject.org/data/tiki-index.php?page=HomePage_Wiki.

In the month since The Reeves Project (TRP) came back on line, we've been progressively reaching out to our community members. We initially sent a generic e-mail via our Google Group on 27 March (to which about half of our members have opted to subscribe to). We've subsequently sent a personal e-mail to over 260 of our existing community members. (My apologies to the handful of you that received two personal e-mails; I initially started by contacting those who had most recently used TRP before we suspended the service, but quickly realised that was more complex than simply working alphabetically through the list of community members). A handful of those personal e-mail messages have bounced straight back where the e-mail address or domain we have for you is no longer in use. If you've changed your e-mail address since you first registered with The Reeves Project, you'll need to contact us. We've also had a couple of minor ISP's block our out-bound e-mail but we've resent those messages via our Gmail account to step round that issue.

The response rate to our e-mail has been somewhat disappointing. If you've been putting off replying, today would be a good day to do so. If you've misplaced the e-mail "The Reeves Project - Invitation to Rejoin" and would like another copy, please contact TRP127(at)TheReevesProject(dot)org

If you've already requested and received details of your new User Name / Membership ID but are having issues logging back into to TRP, please do let us know. Some users seem to have been able to regain access without much pain, but we suspect others are having issues. In particular, we suspect that in some circumstances the password reset function may not be sending the e-mail you need. Please let us know your problem(s) and we'll work with you to get it sorted.

We are also aware that some new users have experienced issues working through the enrolment process with us. We apologise for that. We had finessed the new user registration process over the previous seven years that TRP had been in existence before our service suspension in December 2017. The upgrade to the wiki software underpinning TRP that we've recently undertaken necessitated a change to how we handled new user registrations. We're sorry that the rough edges have been too visible during the past month. If you need help completing your enrolment, please contact Martin via TRP123(at)TheReevesProject(dot)org explaining your issue(s) and we'll work with you to get your enrolment completed.

We think we've identified the major issues that have been encountered with new user enrolment over the past month and made changes on 26 April to both the Join Us form and the process which will hopefully make life easier for future new users.

We will continue to post updates at https://sites.google.com/site/thereevesproject123/

Thank you

Updated by Admin Martin on Saturday 28 April 2018 at 21h00BST/16h00EDT

Status Update - 01 July 2018 - Normal Service resumed (final update)

As noted on the Monthly News page posted to TRP at https://thereevesproject.org/data/tiki-index.php?page=TRP_News_2018_07_01

the login panel was restored to the home page on 1 July 2018, marking the end of the Controlled Service Resumption.