Rick Ross Cult Education Forum loses 2 years of forum threads

Rick Ross cult education forum recently sold its rickross.com domain and moved to culteducation.com, however, in the process 2 years of message board threads from the forum pages have disappeared.

http://forum.culteducation.com/read.php?12,104926

This is a tragedy for the many who relied on his protected site for information on a plethora of harmful groups.

hmmm

I probably should add this from Rick Ross in July - originally posted on the forum, but now only available in the cache.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...94 &cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au&client=firefox-a

I wonder if the new owner of rickross.com will decide to delete all archive.org backups of the site by having a robots.txt exclusion for the wayback machine.

The selling make no sense and unethical.

I don't think that you can destroy the archive.org backups, just block anyone from viewing them for as long as there's an exclusion.

One nasty thing the new owner has done is redirect every 404 not found to it's homepage, so you can't easily get to the archive.org backup from it using bookmarklets
I just went to about a dozen culteducation.com links and all the articles have the same address with the new domain, for example http://culteducation.com/reference/scientology/scien411.html but not a single one of them has shown up on archive.org yet. Just by checking those links I know they'll get archived, so can anyone else that wants to, because I'm not that patient to do them all.

Has it been purchased by that fat rapper?

Who IS the new owner of the website?

Have they any connection to the cult?

Have they deliberately made information disappear, or obscured searches?

I'd love to know WTF is going on over there. It was always a good go to for docs and now it's hopelessly mangled.

It doesn't appear to be a cult conspiracy - just a backup cockup. The site was bought by some gambling conglomerate by the looks.

Don't quote me, but I read some discussion that the domain sale was instigated because there were issues with people searching for rick ross cult information but searches would inevitably bring up a ton of results about the rapper, making it difficult for people to find the cult info site.

This is the official explanation and apology: http://forum.culteducation.com/read.php?12,104995

It is a very strange that Rick Ross deprogrammer would sell his web site
I know some people that have put hundreds of hours (like my friend FLASH ) in meticulous research to expose a phoney guru call Jagad Guru Chris Butler ...a sub Hare Krishna cult
and all that Rick Ross as to say is sorry ....what kinda bullshit is he trying to feed people that trusted him with incredibly deep research on various cult ...i own many web sites and dozen of names
I miticulously take care of my names ....that name RICK ROSS .com was sold for how much $$??
To who ...a gambling site ...very weird ...Rick ross deprogrammer had many problems with the law before
many thoughts he was reform ....but who knows ..maybee he needed the money .
Lets not forget that the Rick Ross forum is part of deprogrammer Rick Ross income
Its the front part of the buseness...where hundreds files complaints about their ex religions ext
the back part ..is where he make is money ....after people read different forums ...be Scientology or Hare Krishna some famaly members might hire deprogrammer Rick Ross at $5,000 a day to go get their son or dauther stuck in a cult .....he basically use all the tread on the forums to bring some desperate people at his door and say HELP ME PLEASE ...and that cost money

^ Now that is dead agenting at work.

Agree. Also study tech at its finest

Bugger! I just realized that I'll have to go through my news media archive and update the links to secondary copies of articles on his site.

No find&replace software?

Sure, but I'll have to verify that the new links are working.

URLcheck software...?

No, it is excellent it happened to that hateful site.

and all of you need to go out and get a job to clean up your hateful minds.

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Busted!

Rick Ross (RR) can rightfully take pride in his past stance against cults, but his handling of the recent data loss was not his finest hour. I have a hunch that the recent loss of data at the Rick Ross Forum might have causes and circumstances beyond anyone’s understanding. The operator of any web site has the primary responsibility to protect and preserve the contributions and data of the members. The sale of rickross.com demonstrates that those contributions were really quite valuable as shown by the web traffic. Personally, I created hundreds of inbound links increasing web traffic. Yet, all those links were wiped out by the manner in which the domain was sold and the content was migrated. I first became suspicious that there was something wrong at the forum when RR announced the sale of the domain name. At that time, some people defended RR and his right to sell what legally belonged to him. My mind focused on why he would sell, not whether he was able. RR said he was getting calls at night. Why didn’t he simply change his number? Why not sell the home page to the rapper dude and work out a compromise?

The next thing that struck me as suspicious was RR announcing that there would be no connection from the old website to the new. In other words, each and every internal link and external link (we’re talking URLs) would cease to work upon cutover and the “authority” of all those search results would be lost forever. Who does something like that and why? On the day of cutover, I breathed a sigh of relief when discovering that the message board was intact with no loss of contributions. I was particularly concerned that many image files might be delinked but they were fine. So, it was quite a shock when a day or two later the entire two years of forum history was wiped out.

Like all of you, I read the explanation of RR blaming a failed backup at his Internet Service Provider (ISP). Curious, I looked that up to see what ISP could make such a huge mistake. IP addresses are like phone numbers and ring at a designated location. The location for both the old forum and the new forum owned by RR is Lexington Kentucky on the servers of Open World, Inc. James Risner is the President of Open World, Inc.

Mr. Risner denies knowing anything about RR and RR denies knowing anything about Risner. Perhaps there is a third party between the owner RR and the company run by Risner, but why don’t they explain that situation and why the public record is what it is? A simple statement of fact seems little to ask.

Before I go on with my questions for RR, let me address his assertion that members can find their old postings on Internet archives. If this is true, why hasn’t he or his ISP (as recompense) recovered all the contents from the archives? More importantly, how can we ever address the lost contributions from those who came and went during the two years? We may never hear from some of them again. Here are my questions for RR:

Who is your ISP, and who is the contact person regarding the loss of data? Explain exactly what is meant by a “backup failure”? Why was the cutover initially intact and then lost a day or two later? Where are the backups for the new website taken immediately after cutover - as is the typical practice?

All ISPs use server technology for their data storage and there only a few software/hardware solutions out there today. Almost all use RAID which is a scheme for storing and replicating data. The replicated copy is written at the same time as the original and can be restored as needed when devices fail or become corrupted. Where is the replicated data? What data recovery methods have been employed and how have you determined that data was truly destroyed?

The message board is presumably stored in a database. What about other files like message logs, email addresses, templates, programs, etc. Why weren’t they lost as well?

Did the sale of rickross.com generate income and has the ISP compensated RR for the loss of data? How much has been spent on attempts to recover the lost data and rebuild the loss of reputation of the message board? Who purchased the domain, by the way?

Most businesses would be shocked at such a huge data loss? Did anyone get fired? Why do you continue to be loyal to a company who apparently cannot be trusted with important data? How can members be assured that their data and even their identities will be protected in the future?

If you are blameless in this horrendous loss, have you considered the possibility that there might be those who are not?

My research is sure to lead to more questions, typically one “truth” leads to one or more possibilities for investigation.
Lastly, I do have the ability to recover some of what I posted during the “lost period”. I’m not bothering until I’m satisfied with the answers and have confidence in RR going forward.

Who knows.

I don't feel that anything malicious was responsible for the deletion. This type of crap happens all the time. the best thing that the community can do is help rebuild the new archives, and make sure that they are better then before.

this also stresses the need for backups, and the need for the community to share information freely. We must remember that lives are at stake when dealing with cults.

Now is the winter of our missed content.

THIS is when I REALLY miss the funny button.

Nobody has mentioned this. If he sold the domain to a person named Rick Ross, that's understandable. Anything else will be very fishy.

To address these two recent comments:

1) “this type of crap happens all the time”
Really? I can’t recall any historical episodes of lost content related to cults that was not malicious. One missed backup is plausible. The complete loss of two years of membership and contributions is highly suspect and deserves a complete explanation. What exactly happened, Ricky boy?

2) “If he sold the domain to a person named Rick Ross, that's understandable. Anything else will be very fishy”.
Very fishy indeed. The domain rickross.com has been moved to a new hosting company and the new “gambling” site has nothing to do with anyone named Rick Ross. The domain registration is private and the new host is PSYCHZ-NETWORKS. If there is nothing fishy, why has Rick Ross kept quiet about the new owners?

Such unjustified paranoia.

From a google ranking perspective it makes complete sense to move to a domain with the word ‘cult’ in the name. That’s the keyword people use in their search terms for this topic. If he could get some dough for the old domain, and it seems he could, all the better.

Backups go south all the time. Just today a project I was involved in lost about 6 months of emails over a domain switch. Shit like that happens all the time – especially for databases as large as the one I imagine powered Ross’s forum, and especially for groups that have fuck all budget and have to use the cheapest hosting they can.

Perhaps an actual expert in Google search algorithms will comment on whether a brand new domain with no SEO budget could have more authority than the 10+ years of postings with thousands of supporting links.

Until I hear a technical explanation of the alleged backup failure, I’m not letting my guard down when it comes to deep-pocket cults. Call it paranoid if you’d like, but “shit happens” is not a technical explanation.

No! Lulz.

Trying to pretend that a domain with an absolutely crucial keyword (in this case ‘cult’) isn’t better than a domain that has keywords of relevance to the topic is just highlighting your ignorance of how search engines work.

If you find a single SEO service that doesn’t tell you this I’ll be impressed.

The SQL got borked and a block of transactions timed out during the process. Pretty standard failure actually.

The irony that someone so utterly ignorant of how basic search engine activity works, which most people on the internet know, would ask for technical explanations of anything is pretty funny. Piss off troll.

I have reported your comment as abusive. I'm certainly not a troll and it is obvious you never even read my original post.
To anyone else following this thread, insulting me does not help to explain why both Rick Ross and his hosting company CEO deny they had a business relationship. Why the cover-up?

View attachment 9cef162d_history-channel-alien-guy-meme-generator-

Troll: Make some claims
Anon: Debunk claims.
Troll: Make different claims.
Anon: Debunk claims.
Troll: Make more different claims.
Rinse and repeat.

The auction process was your usual Godaddy afair, and the highest bidder won. OMGZZ IT'S A CONSPIRACY!!!!

What's goin' on in this thread?

Why, indeed, would this hosting company and Rick Ross both deny any business relationship when the public record links them? See this:

http://myip.ms/view/web_hosting/22996/Open_World_INC.html
No one would care, except that they lost two years of valuable information concerning powerful and destructive cults. Open World Inc. does not seem to be hosting many customers and Rick Ross is an easy guy to remember. If there is a simple explanation, let’s hear it and move on.

Ever hear of co-leasing you jackass? Obviously not. It's extremely common when somebody who is NOT in the tech business has a outsourced webmaster that resells hosting service from a larger provider.

But this is just one of the many flaws in your crackpot conspiracy theories.

The Bilderbergers? Illuminati?

Nah. I say it's OBVIOUSLY the NSA.