Read Me

[CJ]

I've set this board up as a learning exercise. I'm self-learning Linux, docker, portainer, NGINX, and Home Assistant. That said, barring any issues, I'm happy to keep it running.

I picked phpBB because its open source and free. I'm self hosting but have the DNS for the site running through Cloudflare and am using SSL. With that said, please don't register with the same user ID and password you use for anything sensitive.

Because this is self hosted, uptime isn't guaranteed. My internet is pretty reliable but if it goes down, it goes down. Its residential high-speed internet.

For now this is really a test. I may run into unresolvable issues like bandwidth or storage issues or my ISP may start blocking traffic which may result in either downtime or possibly abandoning the project. However, I'm guessing with the amount of traffic we will see it, won't be an issue.

The board isn't fully configured. I want to add some plugins that auto-parse links and embed media but I don't have that all set up yet. I'm not going to be able to pour the kind of time into this as I did 10 years ago so much will stay stock. I'll work on a logo and maybe the colors but I'm not going to upload 20 smilies packs, etc.

I don't have email setup on the server yet so registration is unconfirmed. You just create an account, pass a basic bot test, and you're in. That also means no notifications are working yet. I'll work on it eventually. I'm planning to run my own email server on this same machine.

As I mentioned in the Facebook post, good vibes only, and no politics whatsoever.

Welcome.

________________________________

Resources:
Image re-sizer to crop and make an image 90x90 to upload an avatar: https://imageresizer.com/

[Hpreston]

Several thoughts here.

1) thanks for hosting.
2) I look forward to connecting/reconnecting with folks about various entertainment and other topics.
3) there’s a lot of tech talk in the post, can’t say I understand it all, but I’m happy to be here.

[CJ]

My pleasure. Hopefully this continues to go well. I've been getting VERY heavily into my techie nerd roots originally prompted by attempting to learn Home Assistant. Now I've got a full home lab started and its going to get crazier. I can explain more if people are interested.

[RickC]

CJ thanks for setting this up. Home automation is a very interesting area that has come a long way. When we moved to California our home had a Nexia system with a single remote lock and two remote thermostats. Years later we are using Smartthings with about 60 devices with automations for lights, security, smoke detectors, heating and cooling and a bunch of other stuff including wall panels and home theater automations.

My wife likes using it at times using Alexa but finds it a bit intimidating and wonders what will happen if I die and she is stuck with this stuff and no one to deal with it.

[jasn]

Hey...it's great to be back in touch CJ, et al. Thanks for wading back into the forum world. I've missed it too and hope to see this work out.

jasn (Jim)

[DYohn]

Happy to be here. Thank you for hosting, CJ.