Northern Rhodesians Worldwide

Site Updates and Events in 2004

• Added a Union-Castle map of Africa, circa 1960, to the maps page. Another stunning labour love from Arthur Steevens. Thank-you Arthur!

• Updated the picture submission instructions to reflect the fact that pictures submitted for posting on the message board should be sent to Heather and not Arthur until further notice.
• Reformatted the signatures under messages posted on the message board to add a link to the poster's Web site (if the member has entered the address of the site into his/her Names Directory entry), and to remove maiden and former names and geographical information more specific than the name of the country where the poster lives. This is part of a move to make more of the information provided to the GNR by members more private. Once this project is complete, certain information will be available only to other GNR members (after they have logged in) and not the general public. If you want to include more (or less) than your first and last name in your message board signature, you can log in to edit your entry and enter your desired signature in the "board name" field.
• Various minor updates to the "Contributing to this Site" and "About this Site" pages.
• All archived message boards are once again available to members and the design of the archives page has been improved. To view message boards prior to April 2002 you will need to log in with your GNR user ID and password, because these older message boards used raw e-mail addresses. That said, the e-mail addresses have all been "broken" in an attempt to stymie automated collection by possible spammers and, more likely, members with computers infected with virii and/or worms.
• The old Names Directory (pre-August 2001) has officially been completely deactivated and a helpful error message put in place. While we hoped to make this available once again after it was temporarily deactivated following a move to a new server in June 2003, we decided not to reactivate it for a few reasons:
• Most members who were in the old Directory are now in the current Directory,
• While it might have been nice to keep the old Directory as a sort of on-line museum documenting the early days of the GNR (when the World Wide Web was still quite new to the public), the cons outweighed the pros in this case as it might only have served to confuse the hundreds of new members who have joined since the old Directory was replaced, and it wouldn't have been very useful because much of the contact information is probably out of date, and
• While our original concern was that spammers might get the e-mail addresses in the old Directory, the proliferation of virii and worms that collect e-mail addresses from Web pages browsed by infected computers effectively sealed the old Directory's fate.
• Implemented a (hopefully) more useful and noticeable system of section menus at the top of the pages of identifiable sections of the site. These menus contain links associated with that section of the site, as well as links to other parts of the site that are most often used -- such as the password-retrieval form.
• Updated the message board notes and tips page.
• Incorporated the message board log into the site.
• Added information to the site's contact page to make it more clear that the form is for contacting site management only, not for posting messages to the message board or for members to contact one another.
• These updates are phase one of a two- or three-phase overhaul of the Names Directory and the message board to address privacy, usability and design issues, many of which have been brought up by members over the last few months. There is much more already in the works.

• Made the full GNR membership list available once again. This will take a bit longer to download over slower connections. Maiden names have been left out of the list due to privacy concerns raised by some members, but upon the completion of the enhancements described below they will once again be available to members only, but not to the general public.
• A multitude of other enhancements to the Names Directory, including privacy and usability enhancements, are in development. Many are completed, but can't be rolled out until all are completed because they are interconnected and rely on some fundamental changes required in the structure of the database. I hope to have these in place by the end of September.

• Added a map of Livingstone to the maps page.
• Added a new section to the maps page for maps of other cities and countries of interest to people from Northern Rhodesia and/or Zambia. The first two maps in this section are maps of Salisbury, Rhodesia, and Moçambique. Thanks very much to Carole Evans (née Bruce) for donating these three (including the map of Livingstone) new maps to the GNR.

• Sent an e-mail message to all members advising them of the recent situation experienced with the Names Directory. This message was sent to all members irrespective of whether or not they are subscribed to the mailing list, as the message pertained to the operation and maintenance of all profiles on the GNR; it was not a newsletter. Some important points to note are:
• On Thursday evening (July 29th, 2004, 18:16, GMT) a procedural or coding mistake I made rendered the GNR Names Directory unusable for approximately 38 hours while data was restored from various back-up sources. Most services were restored within a couple of hours, and all services were completely restored on Saturday morning (July 31st, 2004, 08:41, GMT).
• Strongly recommended action: If you joined the GNR or updated your Names Directory entry between June 21st and 23rd (inclusive), 2004, then I ask that you definitely take a few minutes to log in to ensure that everything in your entry is correct. If you have lost or forgotten your user ID and/or password, you can retrieve them through the password-retrieval form.
• Recommended action: If you joined the GNR or updated your Names Directory entry on or after June 21st, 2004, I suggest that you log in to check to ensure that the information contained in your entry is correct. If you have lost or forgotten your user ID and/or password, you can retrieve them through the password-retrieval form.
• At no time was the privacy of members' e-mail addresses or log-in information in jeopardy. This was simply a mistake that resulted in incorrect data being introduced into some records, and data was restored from multiple back-up sources.
• Contrary to an earlier post I made on the message board, any recent changes made by members to their passwords were restored.
• If you have any questions or concerns about this incident, please contact me.

• Added an excellent new road map of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland to the maps page. Thanks very much to Arthur Steevens for purchasing this map for the GNR.

• Archived all site updates for 2003.
• Attempted to update the Nkana-Kitwe map to use the latest software from Autodesk. However, the original map causes errors with the new software and so seems to be incompatible with it. Added a note to this effect to the bottom of the page.

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