Prologue

The Helper

The Helper

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Prologue

I started this site back in the late 1990's on Geocities - the first url was geocities.com/siliconvalley/lab/4614. I was up on a weekend having late night cocktails and decided to make my own website. I wish I had a screen capture of it.

The second URL of the site was geocities.com/~thehelper/ I was on a special Geocities upgraded account that served me well until I needed my own forums.

We have been around over 15 years. The site started as a personal website type of experiment but since I was posting so much in the Blizzard Tech Forums I started using it as a signature. I really did not try to do anything with it for a while as I learned how to design web pages and make every newbie mistake :)

I was answering the same questions over and over in the Blizzard Tech Forums, and Blizzard was not adding to their FAQ so I decided to copypasta a couple pages of my answers from the Blizzard Forum and made a FAQ that was completely addendum to Blizzard - stuff they did not cover.

By that time I had learned about web stats and was able to track all the traffic from every one of my Blizzard Tech Support Forum posts. I posted so much, many times answering all the questions and my name would be seen for pages. When I got the MVP it seemed like the forum glowed with a sea of thehelper and red mvp. Before MVP, every post in that forum at least one person clicked on it. After I got the MVP, those site visits multiplied geometrically.

That is one of the main reasons I got so interested in web stats and got into Search Engine Optimization. I was constantly watching the hit tracking logs looking for trends when I was not answering questions or working on the site.

There is a great story behind the early history of this site and the MVP days. The other first MVPs, t'kron - RIP, Dinobot and the ending of the first MVP program. Then the beginning of a new one, then another....

-------------- end Prologue
 
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General chit-chat
Help Users
  • No one is chatting at the moment.
  • The Helper The Helper:
    Actually I was just playing with having some kind of mention of the food forum and recipes on the main page to test and see if it would engage some of those people to post something. It is just weird to get so much traffic and no engagement
  • The Helper The Helper:
    So what it really is me trying to implement some kind of better site navigation not change the whole theme of the site
  • Varine Varine:
    How can you tell the difference between real traffic and indexing or AI generation bots?
  • The Helper The Helper:
    The bots will show up as users online in the forum software but they do not show up in my stats tracking. I am sure there are bots in the stats but the way alot of the bots treat the site do not show up on the stats
  • The Helper The Helper:
    New recipe is Shipwreck Dinner - https://www.thehelper.net/threads/recipe-shipwreck-dinner.193511/
  • Varine Varine:
    I want to build a filtration system for my 3d printer, and that shit is so much more complicated than I thought it would be
  • Varine Varine:
    Apparently ABS emits styrene particulates which can be like .2 micrometers, which idk if the VOC detectors I have can even catch that
  • Varine Varine:
    Anyway I need to get some of those sensors and two air pressure sensors installed before an after the filters, which I need to figure out how to calculate the necessary pressure for and I have yet to find anything that tells me how to actually do that, just the cfm ratings
  • Varine Varine:
    And then I have to set up an arduino board to read those sensors, which I also don't know very much about but I have a whole bunch of crash course things for that
  • Varine Varine:
    These sensors are also a lot more than I thought they would be. Like 5 to 10 each, idk why but I assumed they would be like 2 dollars
  • Varine Varine:
    Another issue I'm learning is that a lot of the air quality sensors don't work at very high ambient temperatures. I'm planning on heating this enclosure to like 60C or so, and that's the upper limit of their functionality
  • Varine Varine:
    Although I don't know if I need to actually actively heat it or just let the plate and hotend bring the ambient temp to whatever it will, but even then I need to figure out an exfiltration for hot air. I think I kind of know what to do but it's still fucking confusing
  • The Helper The Helper:
    Maybe you could find some of that information from AC tech - like how they detect freon and such
  • Varine Varine:
    That's mostly what I've been looking at
  • Varine Varine:
    I don't think I'm dealing with quite the same pressures though, at the very least its a significantly smaller system. For the time being I'm just going to put together a quick scrubby box though and hope it works good enough to not make my house toxic
  • Varine Varine:
    I mean I don't use this enough to pose any significant danger I don't think, but I would still rather not be throwing styrene all over the air
  • The Helper The Helper:
    New dessert added to recipes Southern Pecan Praline Cake https://www.thehelper.net/threads/recipe-southern-pecan-praline-cake.193555/
  • The Helper The Helper:
    Another bot invasion 493 members online most of them bots that do not show up on stats
  • Varine Varine:
    I'm looking at a solid 378 guests, but 3 members. Of which two are me and VSNES. The third is unlisted, which makes me think its a ghost.
     +1
  • The Helper The Helper:
    Some members choose invisibility mode
     +1
  • The Helper The Helper:
    Latest Recipe is Garlic Parmesan Chicken https://www.thehelper.net/threads/recipe-garlic-parmesan-chicken.193575/
  • The Helper The Helper:
    I bitch about Xenforo sometimes but it really is full featured you just have to really know what you are doing to get the most out of it.
  • The Helper The Helper:
    It is just not easy to fix styles and customize but it definitely can be done
  • The Helper The Helper:
    I do know this - xenforo dropped the ball by not keeping the vbulletin reputation comments as a feature. The loss of the Reputation comments data when we switched to Xenforo really was the death knell for the site when it came to all the users that left. I know I missed it so much and I got way less interested in the site when that feature was gone and I run the site.
  • Blackveiled Blackveiled:
    People love rep, lol
     +1

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