sons of sam horn

John, try http://www.google.com

The URL is very obscure and non-obvious, gygax, don't blame John.

http://www.sonsofsamhorn.com/

2 hrs ago that just went to the old board. you smug bastards.

patience grasshopper

The transition process was super-convoluted. Members had to email their username/password to a Gmail account (secure!) and wait for a moderator to add them to the new board and send them the URL. I haven't gotten my confirmation back yet.

Anyway, I won't be surprised if SOSH is in deep cover for a day or two while they make the switch. I don't know where I'll get my fill of M4rk Sin4cori jokes and right-wing political rants in the meantime!

I expected Red Sox fans to lean a little more to the left than the average baseball cult.

sosh politics always seemed a little left of center to me, actually, but their political msgboard was closed off to non-members.

so wtf's been up w/ the place for the past couple weeks? what's this members only shit? cohen? cohen?

I've been on tour for the last week or so, so I missed most of the drama. But as far as I can tell, migrating SOSH over to their new board format has been sort of a gigantic cock-up. If the email address with which you registered for EZboard was defunct (as was mine, being four years old and all), you weren't getting any of the announcements about the new board registration procedures. In addition, the Gmail account they were using to forward registration information got shut down for suspected spamming, since they were sending hundreds of messages all at once.

I finally got the elusive "third email" today; basically, the system they used to migrate the userlist over to Invision was incredibly insecure (even more so than the aforementioned "email your username/password" instruction). Accordingly, they've had all kinds of problems with accounts being hijacked, and they're doing their best to manage that and make sure everyone's set up correctly before taking the board public again.

In addition:

The SoSH technical crew had to take the site down for a bit to clean up a software issue. Needed some time to address it and reboot the server... should be speedy for the time being. There'll be more maintenance on Wednesday as we add server space to handle our capacity. Apologies for the inconvenience, folks -- once we've got all the gears turning this site will run like a top. Unfortunately, with our ezboard expiration deadline we had to move quicker than expected and have thus had to patch a few holes on the fly.

I've always taken SOSH's technical difficulties in stride, but this has been quite the ordeal. However, it seems like they're changing their policy to allow new members once again (for a fee, I'd imagine):

Additionally (important) lurkers need to apply for membership in order to view the site. With the new settings, there is a possibility we can eat up respurces at a rate faster than our hardware can support, so limiting our page views was necessary. LJ made it clear his first committment was to the members, but that we should make whatever concessions we can to those who may not have accounts. By doing this the option to view Red Sox-related content is still open to everyone, except some casual users who may not like going through the extra step.

I'm not sure if this means that there's going to be a free way to read the message board from here on out, except for grandfathered members. Also note that the old EZboard is still viewable at pub208.ezboard.com/bsonsofsamhorn, although almost nobody's posting there in the non-migration-related threads.