Who Wants to be a Moderator?

Hi friends,

My name is Scott and I built, what is today, shns.net. This project started over a decade ago. While in college (1998), I was trading tons of analogs via snail mail. The internet was just coming alive and I decided to learn HTML.
I had been getting master gen analogs, from tapers for 5 or 6 years, and I if I was ever at somebody's house that had a show that I didn't, I would always make a trade. As my collection grew it became more difficult to keep up with what I had. So, I built a static web site where I kept an updated list of all my jam band shows. This allowed any visitor, to my site, to view my shows and then fill out a form, to request a B&P trade that included the shows they wanted and the shows that were on my want list. This first site was called Scott's Strange Design, later known as www.strangedesign.org, and was hosted on a MindSpring account. That was my first ISP. I still have my email address, for that account, to this day.

After college I briefly moved back to Birmingham and met my current wife. In the spring of 2000, my wife and I bought a house, on the beach, in Ft Morgan, AL. When we moved in I was excited to find out that the entire counties phone system had been owned by a mom and pop shop that had recent sold out for an enormous amount of money. The new TELCO that took over laid fiber around the county, and offered a SDSL connection for $40 a month. For an extra $15 a month I got 5 static ip addresses. This package included a 2.2Mb up/down connection for a grand total of $55 a month. Well, I had recently been getting into etree and was downloading shns 24/7. I was updating my website with available shows, daily. After some research, I realized I that I had enough bandwidth to qualify as an etree siteop. I put together some old computers and setup an ftp server to host SHN's. I think when it first went live i had about 20GB of music.

After about a year of hosting shows I found it extremely hard to keep up with what shows I even had. I started researching web applications where I could store all my information in a database. Since everything I knew was based around Microsoft, I went with writing ASP pages using VBScript. What came out of this was www.shns.net. By utilizing a database, I built a social networking site based around trading lossless, legal, jamband shows. At the time, etree had a database that allowed you to track certain sources, but that was it. I needed an app that tracked every source and automated all my ftp login requests. So, shns.net was everything that etree had to offer and then some.

I really haven't had much to do with this site in the last 10 years. This thing just seems to run with no issues. I might get 3 or 4 emails a year about the site. Anyway, about 2 years ago I converted the entire site from ASP to PHP. This was done because I moved away from the beach, back to Birmingham and could not get a reasonable internet connection, comparable to what I had. I was able to find numerous hosting accounts, for next to nothing that would support PHP, but not ASP. At the same time I had a band approach me (Outformation) that need some help with their website. Everything had been written in PHP so, instead of saying, "I can't do it", I said, "no problem". I spent a few weeks studying PHP and finally taught myself how to write it. I finished the site and added all kinds of add on's, including Fantasy OUt411. This allowed fans to pick songs that they thought the band would play, and every time they were correct, they revived a point value; total points wins!

Back to the present… I simply don't have time for this site anymore and I don't want to take it down. My future plans for this site are to set it up with a bitttorent tracker, to allow all of you to trade via bittorrent. I just don't know that much about it and haven't pushed forward. By not being here I have also not been moderating the message board. Every time I login, I see nothing but spam. I have been banning these members and then deleting their accounts. I would greatly appreciate some folks to help moderate this site. I want to set it up so that all logins have to be approved, and this is what you would do. You could also delete posts and basically keep the site clean. If anyone is interested, please email at: scott@shns.net
If any of you have some knowledge in bittorent tracker, by all means, contact me. I would love to get this up and running.

Thanks,
SD