Luftwaffe Archives and Records Group (LWAG) website update

[Richard T. Eger]

Dear All,

With much gratitude to my visiting son and his girl friend, the site software has been updated, which includes improved spam prevention during registration. With this positive move, I have again re-opened the site to new membership registration. Hopefully, this will much deter spam registrations.

I want to thank all who wrote to me with words of encouragement and offers of assistance. They helped buck up my mental state as I struggled with this nasty problem for the third year in a row. I have provided the LWAG site as a service to those wanting to do Luftwaffe related research. The side benefits of doing this are that I have made many new friends and learned a lot, myself, about where to go for what.

While I shouldn't take the spam attacks personally, a part of me does. They are a pernicious "virus" that threatens to take down a site intended as a service to others. It is disgusting. Were it not for the able services provided by my son and his girl friend, both computer scientists, the site might have gone down or, at the least, continued on without the ability to accept new members. I sat mind numbed as I watched them work their magic. In the end, it wasn't as difficult as they had thought it might be, they having taken every possible precaution to assure that whatever moves they might make wouldn't end in an irretrievable loss. At one point, having 7400 lines of unexplained code, we almost gave up, fearful that to make a move with this mystery hanging over our heads could end up in disaster. As recommended, they set up a second site to cross compare visually the new to the old. All looked well and the transition was made. This is not something for a website internals ignoramous such as myself. My "expertise" is in the subject matter, not the vehicle by which it is provided. I did not physically create the site. That act of kindness was performed by Chuck Petrie of Stormbirds and his close friend James Bradley.

Regards,
Richard