So, folks I have figured out why the site was kicking some of you out, and it's because your subscription was entered at a time before the software had a field called "Member_ID", which is automatically generated (but can be manually added too). This is why you must "re-register" as a member, so the system can generate that number. Once that Member_ID field is filled it is only then that your membership is correct.

Side note: Isn't progress fun?

When I took on the job of updating Internet Rug Camp, the first thing that needed to occur was to update the site software because at the rate we were going, the odds of getting hacked were stacked heavily against us! It's a wonder we were not hit because the software we were running was about three years out of date, and software life is kinda like "dog years". If something is three years old it's really 21. And when software hits the legal drinking age, bad things can happen.

We use a somewhat odd combination of software. Our primary CMS (Content Management System) is Joomla and within that CMS we are running Wordpress for the blog. Anyone familiar with CMS technology either rolls their eyes or laughs when they hear this, but the thing is, Wordpress (WP) is pretty much the #1 blog software out there. And Gene is used to it so we don't need to alter his "flow". Much like causing everyone here to "re-start their account", this is a "ripple in the flow" and we're gonna try to keep those events to a bare minimum.

For all you techies, we went from Joomla 2.5.28 (ancient technology in the case of CMS software) to Joomla 3.9.2. All of the other site software was then updated and we're now secure in the fact all the systems are in their current release.

Another factor in the "shutting out" of people was that I set the system software to "block" certain page addresses so as to control access to that content. It keeps out "leechers" (those who get around the "paywall" and ensures that the content remains exclusive to Gene.

Anyhow, this site has been a challenge of my skills as there were many incorrect paths that needed correcting and I had fun playing with SQL language, doing find/replace missions and taking out lots of "weeds". Fun fact- The "old" website address was http://internetrugcamp.com/rugcamp2/ so when I fixed the paths I had to search for "/rugcamp2/" and found over 270,000 references to that text! The KJV Bible text, in a plaintext file is 4.5MB in size. The size of all the /rugcamp2/ instances was just under 5MB. That's a lot of rugcamp2!

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