Jim Alfredson

Hi friends, As mentioned in the thread "Site Problems" here in this subforum, I recently updated the server and appropriate software to run this site as well as signed up for Cloudflare to reduce our susceptibility to bots. The inordinate number of thread scanning bots was slowing this site to a crawl. As such, my costs have gone up by over $50 a month. I admit I've been remiss about asking for donations but I could definitely use some now. I plan on adding some discrete and unobtrusive ads to the site to help with the costs, but until then this place is costing me personally over $200 a month. I'm currently building a fully professional multi-room recording studio and have sunk close to $60k of money into it so far, so that $200 a month is a strain, to be perfectly frank. Anything helps. My Paypal is b3groover at hotmail dot com. My Venmo is @Jim-Alfredson if you prefer that (last four digits of cell phone are 4815) Anything helps. Thanks a lot! ----Jim

@GA Russell are you still having posting issues? Are you on a VPN or shared office network?

Correct. I'm trying to fix the issue with having to sign in all the time. It's annoying but should be fixable with Cloudflare.

Is it still happening this afternoon? It hasn't happened to me since I changed the setting in the Admin CP earlier today.

Yes, because Cloudflare is acting as a proxy, the forum sometimes sees the IP address of the user change during a session and freaks out. There's a button in the Admin CP to change this behavior and I just switched it, so hopefully this works.

Making CDs or releasing music in general is a financial loss these days for the majority of people. Streaming services all but killed physical media sales. Yes, there are still people who buy physical formats (like me) but not in the volume they did before. That said, there are exceptions and I have been inspired to try a different route after watching this video.

That was me. I was messing around with some stuff, trying to get my personal site updated and wound up messing some things up. Got it sorted and finally went to bed at 5am. Fun.

Is anyone else having an issue where you have to continually sign in even though you click the box 'keep me signed in'? Trying to see if this is just me or more widespread.

Thanks. I changed it.

To be fair, nobody has heard the vinyl yet. But I get the concerns about the club itself. My plan is to get this Smith release and then cancel.

I just changed the Cloudflare cache settings as we were having log-in stability issues and something called "session bleed", where sometimes it would show you logged in as someone else. Everything should be working good now. Please let me know if you have any issues either here, on FB, email (info @ organissimo dot org) or homing pigeon.

I'm surprised there isn't a thread about this. Or maybe there is and I just haven't seen it. I just signed up for the Verve Record Club, mainly to get the new Jimmy Smith: The Champ: Live in Hermosa Beach release. Recorded in 1965 at the legendary Lighthouse and featuring Quentin Warren on guitar and Billy Hart on drums, this is no-brainer for me! Has anyone else signed up for this club? What other releases are you enjoying? How is the quality of the vinyl?

So sorry for the long outage. I've been working with the server company to get everything back and running smoothly since 6pm today (currently almost midnight). I think we can all agree that site is snappier than it's been in years. Keeping the bots away should help a lot.

Hi friends, I have signed up for Cloudflare and changed the nameservers, which will take up to 24 hours to fully propagate. During this time some problems may arise. Just let me know and I'll try to fix them. The added cost is another $28 per month. I have been paying for this forum out of pocket for quite some time and it's now up to almost $200 per month. I think the best solution to this problem is to start allowing ads on the site. We have 20,000 unique visitors every month. I'm missing out on thousands of dollars of income per month. I will keep the ads to a minimum but I think that's the best way forward at this point because I simply cannot afford to keep this thing going otherwise. Thanks for your understanding.

Kenny stopped posting here in 2018 but he was a valued member of this forum for 15 years. I just saw on FB that he passed away yesterday. I do not have any more details.

Thanks, everyone. I just tried checking this forum and it was SUPER slow still. The server hosting company just upgraded the RAM from 4GB to 8GB which was supposed to mitigate this problem but it still persists. That's frustrating. I am, however, still proud of myself for figuring out how to turn on the PHP extensions that the forum needed after the server company updated to PHP 8.1.

I had the server company upgrade us to PHP 8.1 to prepare for the new Invision software version 5 that's coming soon and the board went down because they didn't install the correct extensions. I actually figured out how to do it myself! We'll be upgrading the server with more RAM to handle the extremely large database soon. It will cost another $10 a month but I think it'll be worth it. We've been having some serious slow downs recently.

The SSL certificate expired on Feb 3 but I didn't see an email about it because it went to my SPAM folder for some reason. I don't know why it's not on auto-renew. I'll figure that out. All good now. Sorry for the inconvenience.

The issue was people deleting all of their posts, which of course completely ruins the continuity of discussions. This has happened at least three times in the past and has made a lot of work for myself and the mods to restore the posts. I can increase the time allotment but I do think it's a reasonable response to the problem.

I have no idea if I even still have the source files that I made these mp3s from all those years ago. So creating 'hi-res' versions might be tough. I am working on a Christmas album with a fantastic singer for next year, though. I wanted to get it done this year but it didn't happen. We have a gig tomorrow to try out some of these tunes and see what we need to work on. It'll basically be organ trio + tenor + singer.

We are set for this year but it's not too early to start thinking about next year! I'll look into the subscription model. The MusicPlayer forums just started doing that because they are having trouble keeping the doors open as well. They are doing $5 a month or $50 per year in order to have posting privileges.

I'm sorry to hear this. What a life and career. The first time I met Dr. Lonnie Smith, he was playing with Lou Donaldson at The Firefly Club in Ann Arbor, MI. As a 20 something year old kid, I didn't really understand how the bass pedals were used in jazz organ playing and Dr. Lonnie set me straight. I worked up the courage to go talk to him after the gig and he sat me right down on the bench and showed me the technique. I got to meet Lou then, too. He was a sweet, gentle man with a wicked sense of humor, which is reflected in his music. I love so many of those Blue Note organ records he did. Alligator Boogaloo. Mr Shing-a-Ling, Good Gracious!, Midnight Creeper, Natural Soul, etc. What a legend.

I need to call the server company and see if I can pay for the entire year rather than monthly. As of now, we've raised $1300 + Dan's $130 that paid to get the lights turned back on, so $1430 in total. That's awesome! You guys are great. If I can get it just paid for the entire year, then we don't need to worry about it again until next February. I'll look into some subscription models. I think this software supports it.

That's a great idea. I'll see if this forum software supports that.

Friends, I apologize for the extended downtime. To be blunt, the server went down because I didn't pay the bill. This time of year is the absolute worst for me financially and frankly I just didn't have the money to pay it. I should've come here sooner and reminded everyone about donations, because it's been months since I've received one. But I've been working 12-16 hours a day on repair projects, trying to make some money. Member Dan Gould paid for this month and to him I'm very thankful. Anyway, I'm not complaining, just letting everyone know the reality. As is the case everywhere, the price to run this place has gone up slightly. My server fees are $138 per month and the license to use the forum software doubled from $99 a year to $199 a year. I haven't paid that yet. So in total it's $1855 a year to keep the lights on. I wish I could get the Donations tab working again. I'll look into that some more. That was nice when it was working. Anyway, my PayPal is [email protected] Thanks!