Putting HDTV on the Map in Oklahoma

This site has been running for about eight and a half years tracking the digital television transition. During that time, through two content management systems nearly 3,400 items and more than 15,000 comments have been posted. There have also been more than 900 posts in the forums through two different systems. During that time, 11,300 user accounts have also been added, but as near as I tell, fewer than 1,000 of those are not hackers simply looking for an way in to do whatever.

With the analog cutoff for some stations more than a year out and all stations since last summer, I’ve been rethinking the site and am going to make it more functional and interactive. There are also a few problems that will be fixed by these changes. As some of you know, I make my living doing web development and I’ve often used this site as a way to learn new things and experiment with things before I install them on client sites. This transformation is no different.

The first step in this upgrade process is going to be getting rid of the user accounts that don’t seem to have been created by real humans. The easiest way for me to do this is to delete the user accounts that have never posted an item, a comment or a forum post. While that might delete some actual real people from the system, I can’t think of a better way to identify who is actually participating in the site. And once I do this, I’ll be adding some software to better identify hacker accounts in the future so it should make it easier for me to maintain, which is one of my goals.

So, until someone jumps up and screams “NOOooooo!” I’ll be deleting the accounts later in the week. If your account gets deleted because you’ve never posted an item, comment or forum post, you’ll still be able to recreate it in the normal way. And, this would be a good time to comment if you haven’t done so before.

The rest of the changes will follow shortly after and throughout the process I’ll be posting links on Twitter.

Dennis