***Important Website Changes Coming in 2024!***

Hi guys! Happy Hump Day.

I wanted to quickly throw this post up in here right now while I have a quick minute on me.

I wanted to just bring to the forefront some of the changes that we could expect to see on this site in the new year.

1.) EOL (end of life) to the daily market direction poll games in 2024 - As I'm sure many of you have noticed all year long, I have been struggling mightily to keep up with the market games on this forum, and just maintaining this website with content daily as a whole in general has been a huge challenge! Unfortunately with life outside of the internet, it hasn't given me much time to spend on the boards here. Much less trading! Case in point -- I haven't put on a single trade in this entire 2023 thus far due to being so heavily swamped with IRL. It's been a bit unfortunate if I'm being honest, especially for me because I know this year has seen its share of nice market volatility which I've mostly missed by and large sadly. Thus, it's very possible I will need to bring to an end the daily market direction game in the new year so sorry to say. I know some of you always look forward to participating on them daily which I have greatly appreciated! But, "time" hasn't been too kind to me for a long while now.

2.) Daily thread updates may cease seeing updates in 2024 -- These are threads like the daily dividend calendars, daily economic events, and earnings threads, etc. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to continue updating these threads in the new year as my daily schedule will only get worse in 2024 unfortunately. Hence, the daily updates may be going on an extended break until further notice. (This would also include ZH's daily and weekly market updates).

I was going to post a 3rd one, but alas as of now I think the above 2 are the top changes that we could expect to see on this website going forward in 2024.

I really do greatly apologize from the bottom of my heart for these changes in the new year. And I'm reeeeeeeally hoping none of these changes will alter the way you guys use this board on a daily basis going into 2024. I know the daily market direction game poll was something that you guys always looked forward to participating in everyday and that kept some of you guys coming back to the site daily which was an awesome little trick haha.

But unfortunately, nothing lasts forever. And I really need to do this or else I I'm literally going to go insane lol.

I've been really struggling to maintain this website for a long while now due to my very busy daily life. I just don't think I can continue doing this for much longer. And it really pains me to say it, but I'm just being wholeheartedly honest here.

I love running the games, and have been doing so for years and years and years. But, the daily game is definitely one that is the most time demanding for me. The weekly games are largely fine.

Speaking of, I am also thinking of abolishing the monthly and quarterly games as well. And just keep the weekly game running for now and seeing how well I can manage to run it with my limited time that I will have.

Anyway, I will just leave it at that for now. If any of you have any questions about any of this stuff feel free to chime in!

So sorry again if this comes as a bit of a disappointment or shocker for any of you. I've been wanting to throw this post up in here for a while now and never really had the time do so until now. Glad to finally get this out there.

take care for now,
-Cy.

 

thanks so much for chiming in here guys!

btw, just thought i should also mention here that i've changed up the nightly server maintenance period once more from 1 - 3 AM eastern time to now 12 - 2 AM eastern time. this now means this site will be online even earlier than before.

i am hoping this outage period works out even better than the previous one. let me know!

i know we have a few night owls and early birds on here, so i think 12-2 AM eastern time should work the best for both. we shall see.

 

Just another quick update here with this! I was able to minimize the nightly server maintenance time all the way down to just 1 hour long now.

So now, site availability will be nearly 24/7. It will only be offline for 1 hour nightly from 12-1 AM eastern time.

I am hoping this new nightly server maintenance time will help us in the long run with the growth of this board.

We have seen some new members join over the past week or so which has been super nice to see.

 

now that i seem to have resolved the ssl certificates for this site this week, i've gone ahead and reapplied the auto redirection on all site urls that were prefixed with the standard http --> https

so when you type in stonkforums.com in your web browser it should automatically bring you to the https version of this site. if someone could just quickly confirm that is actually the case would be super helpful! tia.

meanwhile, if someone wouldn't mind to also let me know if you have this link working on your end?

http://www.smlchat.com

^^ i'm curious if that site also automatically brings you to the "https" version.

i guess someone like @stock1234 could test that out for me seeing as he sometimes checks in from public internet and can only access the websites that are prefixed with https.

if all is working fine, then i'm happy to say that all ssl certificate issues have been resolved successfully and we should hopefully not experience these issues again in the future.

 

oh and if someone has the http://smlchat.com working with https and can also just quickly register a username account on that site, and test to see if you can type some text message in that chat box up top would be insanely amazing to see if it works for you guys.

alternatively you guys can just simply type smlchat.com in your web browser and it should pull up the site that way as well.

thx for any help here testing those out for me!

 

Thank you for confirming that all is working fine on your end @stock1234 much appreciate this.

I'm curious if the smlchat.com site also worked fine for you. If someone could register an account on there and post a quick chat message at the top of that page would be really cool. I know it works fine on my end, but just not sure if it actually works for any others. Thanks in advance!

 

hmm...interesting. wonder if any others are also experiencing that issue?

did this issue just start happening very recently for you (like this week)?

thought i had renewed the ssl certificates the other day. so the site should be fully accessible via the https.

does this also happen for you when you type in stonkforums.com into your web browser?

definitely want to resolve this for you either way.

very curious if any others are having this issue also. if so, then this is a widespread issue. and not just a specific user only issue.

thx for this heads up and sorry to hear that you're not able to access this site from your laptop anymore.

 

great to hear! just curious but were able to access smlchat.com from your laptop? or is malwarebytes also blocking that site on your laptop.

 

so i took a bit of a U-turn on my initial decision to discontinue the daily game next year

i'm gonna try my best to run everything again in the new year (at least to start initially the year) but it's very possible i may need take frequent breaks throughout the course of the year due to my insanely busy IRL. keeping this forum updated with content everyday has been a real big challenge and a bit of burden on my shoulders for me this year. and i don't really see that letting up much going into the new year unfortunately..

i know the daily games were an important part of the forums here because it keeps you guys coming back to the site daily to vote. mostly why i'm gonna try all that i can to keep that going in 2024.

i'll try my best with the limited time that i have on nowadays. but will give no guarantees that i'll be able to run it continuously all year without any interruptions.

 

btw @stock1234, just wondering here but did this site work on your laptop prior to this week? trying to figure out if the culprit to this issue is the new ssl certificates that I installed on the server this week.

Also did this site ever work for you on the old http. As you might know, I’m now using full https for this site so I’m curious if that is in fact the issue. Maybe if I reverted that back to the old http so it doesn’t automatically redirect all urls to https again? Not sure but just thinking out loud here. Let me know. Sorry again for the issues this week! Hope to get this resolved for you.

 

I might try to revert that auto redirection from http to https right now and see if that fixes the issues with your Malwarebytes blocking this site on your laptop. I’ll run that shortly. Will let you know once it is done.