Updates Continued
By Walter Boomsma
207 343-1842
Communications Director
Can you tolerate a little more information about the mechanics of communication and the website? For those who are suspicious or even hateful of technology, you’ll love this!
Some will recall about a year ago, the Maine State Grange was “hacked” by someone in Turkey (we think). A lot was involved in fixing the hack, including the need to rebuild much of the site after correcting the damage that was done.
A year later, Phil Vonada, National Grange Communications Director, by sheer luck, stumbled on to a post attributed to the Maine State Grange Website. It clearly was not something we’d posted.
After some investigation, it appears to have been made during that hack a year ago. These hackers are both smart and sneaky. They obviously back-dated the post to 2016 in the hopes it would escape notice. It did! It’s now been removed.
Several things can be learned from this. First, one can’t be too careful. A healthy degree of suspicion and mistrust is necessary when using the Internet in general and social media in particular!
Second, back when the breach happened, a lot of history was both lost and deleted. Understand that as part of ongoing maintenance, I continue to delete history as my time permits. This accomplishes a number of things–most importantly, it keeps the site current and makes it much more manageable.
To create perspective, as of this writing, there are over 1,000 posts on the site, some dating back to 2016. While they can be interesting, they really do have little value. My ultimate goal is to keep posts and pictures limited to the past three years. This seems to be more than sufficient. This will be a reduction of approximately 25%. That also represents a huge reduction in server space and the potential for erroneous, outdated information.
Certainly, if you have any questions about this, I’ll be happy to try and answer them, either in a future column, comment, or email.
This is certainly not meant to discourage anyone from submitting events, news, etc. If anything, it means there’s room for more! As Dean Martin used to say, “Keep those cards and letters coming in!”
► FACT: During the first week in August, there were 513 emails delivered to website subscribers. (The most subscribers get is one email per day.) A big advantage for subscribers is that they don’t have to remember to check the website and can choose which posts they are going to read entirely.