A few weeks back I asked on here what is the BCGA and got some interesting feedback.
One which is posted here is by the old webmaster himself. While I didn’t identify him he chose to do so himself.
I have had a conversation or two with Henry in the past about the web-page and while he admits he is not a HTML expert but a programmer for other computer languages. So Henry shouldn’t be charging full price if you are not qualified in it.
My thoughts on this have been for the last several years have been, when one is in over their head say something or ask for help. Henry didn’t do that.
Henry says “I have not ‘web mastered’ the site in 2 years.”. Really Henry did you not run the Election for the BCGA in the spring of 2014 or 2013? Sorry but that is within the two years.
So Henry here are the facts:
March 04 2013 the BCGA Executive authorized a payment to you for $303.78
September 23 2013 the BCGA Executive authorized payment to you for $731.25
Of the last amount above $157.50 was for the Election along with $45.00 for membership updates during the Election. Imagine what the cost would have been if you not given the BCGA a break? I have no idea what the membership updates were during the election. I am not sure why you were doing updates of members when the only thing you were to do was fix the voting modal if there was a problem. Look I can’t fault you for this but I fault the BCGA for not looking elsewhere.
A 3rd party voting company was around $120 when I last checked.
I suggested 3 years ago that we move to a different method by contracting to an outside company to cast the votes. This way is is fair and impartial. That was turned down because the Voting Module was considered better and cost less, I just proved above this wasn’t the case.
So Henry my head was not up my ass as you have suggested and yes I do know how to read a calendar. It would appear that you Henry don’t know how to read a calendar. So to help you understand this March 2013 would be 26 months and September 2013 would be 20 months. There are 24 months in 2 years and you said it was over 2 years ago. Does this help you now?
Oh yes by the way, you did declare this on your income tax as income didn’t you?
This brings me to the BCGA’s Newsletter yesterday. I have for three years been harping on the BCGA to go outside and use a 3rd party for voting. Yesterday the BCGA announced they have done just that with the addition of servers and the company located in Canada. This too has been a bug of mine since the USA Canned spam act of allowing the collection of information on USA based servers. It doesn’t matter where it comes from, if it is on a USA server it is fair game.
I congratulate the BCGA for taking this bold step.
It is funny how the BCGA has come around to some of my suggestions over the years.
Now I saw something that really puzzled me in yesterdays newsletter. I was looking at who is elected and not running and saw All That Glitters as a Director at large. No where on the BCGA could I find any mention of this in recent minutes nor a current list of who the Executives were. It was not till almost dinner before a post was made on the forums explaining there was a resignation and an appointment.
This should have been done prior to the news letter going out.
What I did notice in reading the many months of recent minutes there is not one report at the Executive Meetings from the Treasure. Why?
Now if the BCGA would only remove the the Drivers Licence requirement for membership this would be even better as the BC Privacy Act does not allow for this type of use.
Yesterday while doing research for the above I came upon a very troubling item with the new BCGA web-page. The new webmaster left many back doors open to the website including the ability to view the membership list to the forums which totals 5025 members.
I was able to see peoples caching names then their first and last names. This on the surface may not seam like much, but it is. The practice for registering on Forums goes back to to the start of newsgroups and forums where one uses a “screen name” to post under. This is done to stop harassment of people and to protect them.
The BCGA violated their own Privacy Policy by doing this and one can bet that even a apology will be issued.
I learned something else interesting that the BCGA Executives registered them selves differently than the rest of us on the site. I found a test membership that show they were playing around trying to hide their first/last names and just have their caching names appear. The problem with this was the webmaster did know exactly how to do this so the names of those he tried to change appeared in the URL line of the browser.
So the question is what makes the Executive so special?
I was searching on the BCGA site and it is so screwed up that I went to Google and did a search.
Let me explain how this works. Google and other search engines send out bots several times a day to search for new pages and changes and then list them on the search engine. Now there are ways to stop these bots from looking at your page by entering some code in the header to tell the bot what to do with that page. You can say no to the bot or not index links on the page to name a couple. If you do nothing then the bot defaults to look at everything.
One may not think this is a problem but here a scenario that I was made aware of today. A member registers on the site under their legal name with their geocaching name. Now they are known by a different name to the caching world to protect them selves from a past abusive relationship. Now the legal information gets snapped up and catalogued in Google. Google then marries the two names together because of the caching name. If that spouse ever does a Google search then that person has been outed.
Google provided me a link to an open directory on the BCGA site. I could see everything back to the start of the BCGA. The interesting part was being able to view files I am sure the BCGA didn’t want to be seen. What puzzles me is files that were typed one day and then back dated on the site itself. Why is this?
There is an easy way to close these directory folders and I have to say it was likely one of the first things I was taught when I built my first page.
This afternoon I sent an email to the BCGA advising them that there were problems. I advised them to take the site down and fix the problems and get the site done right before making it live again.
Early this evening I received an email from the BCGA and it said that the problems were fixed and they were not aware the membership list was view able. I was then scolded because I did not advise them earlier of this. Well I have a life and it took some time to draft the email to them to explain the problem.
Well I checked right after the email and some of the problems are not fixed.
The BCGA has locked everyone out from being able to change their personal information and how to subscribe to different things on the site. SO how do we do this now?
I had advised them not to bring the site back online till all was fixed, but hey they know best.
The BCGA has once again been advised that they still have problems.
As I told the Executive tonight sometimes they have to swallow some pride and admit they are in over their heads and ask for help.
Lets see if it is fixed by morning…