I have a confession to make. I've deleted the thread about the London Bombing emergency number by accident.

In the meantime, I'm apologise to all readers; I pressed the wrong button, meant to remove one post, not the entire topic.

Update:
I have pages 1, 2, 4 and 5 from my cache, which I have emailed to Daniel. I don't have page 3, so if anyone has it, email it to Daniel at support [AT] saynoto0870.com and he will try and get it back.

Once again, I'm sorry about this, I pressed the wrong button.

Good News!

From one of my many emails I sent earlier on, I've received a reply back from Ailsa Beaton on behalf of the Commissioner, as follows:-

Quote:

The Commissioner has asked me to respond to your e-mail.  The number used is provided to the MPS as part of a national service hosted by the Police Information Technology Organisation.  At our request they have now provided a geographic UK number which will be announced shortly. Ailsa Beaton Director of Information Metropolitan Police Service

As you can see they have now decided to release a geographical.  I shall wait until they have done this and then ask why they chose that number in the first place and in a month or so I'm gonna do an FOI request to see how much they profited from this number and where it was (or going to be) spent.

Has anyone else got any other ideas of questions I should ask at the same time as replying back to this email from Ailsa?

(I shall post this in the original thread if Daniel can bring it back again)

A geographical number has now been released for people calling from overseas, it is 0207 158 0010.

However the met still continue to promote the 0870 number!!!!!!

See
www.met.police.uk/news/terrorist_attacks/

wrote on Jul 8^th, 2005 at 6:30pm:

I have a confession to make. I've deleted the thread about the London Bombing emergency number by accident. I have sent a message to Daniel in the hope that he can get it back. In the meantime, I'm apologise to all readers; I pressed the wrong button, meant to remove one post, not the entire topic.

Does anyone happen to have posts from the previous thread cached on their PC ?

If so, I can try and rebuild it, but unfortunately it can't be recovered, as the backup took place just before most of these messages were posted to the thread.

Thanks in advance,
Daniel

wrote on Jul 8^th, 2005 at 6:49pm:

Does anyone happen to have posts from the previous thread cached on their PC ?l

No of course not Daniel.  This forum operates on such an appalingly shoddy software platform that even if one presses the Back button if a post is not picked up properly by the thread then what one originally wrote is no longer there.  But in most other web forums it would be.  There have also been problems today when a post causes the thread to roll over to start a new page.

This is nothing short of a total outrage and a travesty and I believe you should seriously consider removing Dave's priviliges as a moderator for at least a month as a result of this.

I have spent hours of my time today making valuable contributions to this thread which have led to the Met backtracking and deciding to finally publish a geographic number - the Information Director of the Met has herself  been reading this very thread as proved by the comments she made to me about it during our phone conversation.

This is one of the most important threads in the entire history of this forum and now it doesn't exist because of Dave playing god and wanting to delete a particular contributor's post.  But if Dave could let freedom of speech take its course or if this website was hosted on a more high tech server that was constantly backed up then this wouldn't have happened.

To be quite honest this could be the end of me bothering to contribute in this forum if this is the professionalism with which it is run.  It is also totally pathetic that update emails on an existing thread still always take one to Page one instead of the current active page.

By achieving this victory today this forum has finally grown up but we are still using forum software suitable for the kindergarten.

Apologies for this rant but if there was ever a totally unforgivable thread for Dave to accidentally delete then this is it.  And sorry but I am going to find it very hard indeed to forgive Dave for this.

We now have most of the pages back from cache, and I will get them rebuilt into the original thread asap.

I agree about the forum - It is a job that has been ongoing for sometime.  The main problem is the downtime that will be required for the forum to be converted.  The original software I was planning to use has had a lot of security issues lately, so has been put me a big step back.

The removal of this thread was a genuine mistake, which occured whilst Dave was trying to help another forum member.

If anyone has any recommendations for suitable forum software, I would be very interested in your views. - Please can any comments on this be posted to the 'Site Related' section of the forum.

Apologies again for the disruption.

Daniel

wrote on Jul 8^th, 2005 at 7:03pm:

I have spent hours of my time today making valuable contributions to this thread which have led to the Met backtracking and deciding to finally publish a geographic number - the Information Director of the Met has herself  been reading this very thread as proved by the comments she made to me about it during our phone conversation.

As I have said on the other thread, I have pages 1, 2, 4 and 5 saved. We just need page 3.


Quote:

This is one of the most important threads in the entire history of this forum and now it doesn't exist because of Dave playing god and wanting to delete a particular contributor's post.  But if Dave could let freedom of speech take its course or if this website was hosted on a more high tech server that was constantly backed up then this wouldn't have happened.

The post I was deleting was my own. I put it there because a member complained that their reply was not showing, yet they were shown as the latest poster. I posted a test post and the other member's reply appeared on a new page (page 6) above my test post. I went to delete my test post and clicked remove topic instead of the 'Remove' on the post.

My apologies again, we will have it back.  :-[

NGN, you can vent your anger on the MSE Vent Board, HERE ;D

Don't take it out on Dave - he does the best he can - not his fault he's a little dim ::)

(just kidding about you being dim, Dave 8))

NGM,

I understand where your coming from and I know you, like everyone else, has contributed a lot to this forum and in particular that thread but what Dave did was a accidental mistake.

It wasn't intentional and he wasn't playing god because this all started because of problems I had posting and he was helping me out.

I have not long sent Daniel an IM with the history behind how this really unfortunate mistake happened and here it is:-


Quote:

Hi Daniel, I know you're probably busy in trying to sort out the accidental deletion of this thread but this all started because of the following:- I posted a reply at 6.49pm saying that they now plan on releasing a geographical number.  I had no error messages or anything when I posted and the forum menu even said I was the last person to post at 6.49pm but when I went into it, it wasn't displaying my post for some unknown reason. I logged-out, cleared my IE cache etc and logged in again hoping it would appear but it never even though it still said I was the last one to post. I then noticed Dave was on and sent an IM to Dave asking if he could see my post.  At about 7.15pm, Dave replied back saying it was strange but he also couldn't see my post (I didn't think he would but it was just a thought). I then immediately posted again the same post and this time it appeared but this time the post I had made at 6.49pm showed up as well.  So to avoid a double post, I deleted the 6.49pm one but after the page reloaded both my posts had gone - the 6.49pm and the one at about 7.15pm. In between all this happening, Dave had done a test post and discovered that my post (#75) was came up then his post (#76). By the time Dave had done that, I had posted again (because to my knowledge none of my posts were visible because my deleting one removed the other) and after the page reloaded I noticed that my post from earlier had shown (because of Dave's test post) and of course the one that I had just posted. Again because we had two posts the same, I then decided to delete my very last post but got an error saying it didn't exist.

I also note that Dave has a cache copy of all pages except page 3 so hopefully this can be rebuilt.

I just wrote a long post telling people here that I have this evening been called personally by Ailsa Beaton, the Met's Director of Information, to tell me that after reading my earlier posts complaining that it was not fair to pass the buck on to Pito there has now apparently been a road to Damascus style change of heart over at the Met.

Miss Beaton has promised me that by midnight tonight all relevant sources will now also show a geographic phone number as well as the existing 0870 number.

I do find it more than a little worrying that someone who is the Met's Director of Information and on the board of Pito should previously have been, on her own admission, totally unaware of the high costs of calling these numbers from BT Payphones and mobile phobes and also the impossibility of calling them from overseas.  But perhaps these days one only makes it to director level in such a large organisation if one accepts the politically correct version of the universe rather than the nasty gritty reality of life which those of us who are slightly more cynical are only too well aware of.

Whatever may be the case it is certainly good to know that the action of this site has managed to change the situation while most of those at Ofcom have apparently been snoozing once again after using the excuse of the bombing for another day's extra annual holiday.

It is just a very big shame that in a fit of totally intemperate censorship Dave has managed to delete the most important thread in the history of the forum which had a huge variety of useful information contained within it.

I would recommend removing both the Dave's moderator priviliges and leaving this job only to you Daniel.

Then they could focus their own attention on clearing the ever growing backlog of 0845 and 0870 alternate numbers which this site is supposed to be all about.  Unfortunately lately they seem to have been totally diverted by spending most of their time ticking people off for their forum posts.

An 0845 geographic alternative number I added a few weeks ago for the viewers and listeners comments section of a major uk television channel is now still in the unverified list.

Earlier tonight I sent Matt Peacock at Ofcom a link to the discussion in this thread but now it doesn't exist any more.  I was also about to send a link to the thread to a friend of mine who is a councillor.

Dear Daves please stop censoring us and get on with the main job of getting all those unverified numbers into the verified list.

wrote on Jul 8^th, 2005 at 7:14pm:

I have not long sent Daniel an IM with the history behind how this really unfortunate mistake happened

I was also getting this problem with new posts that would have started up a brand new page in the thread not appearing.

But I overcame it by posting a blank message with 2 spaces in it that made my missing post then appear at the top of the page.  Then when another forum member had made a post I deleted the blank message and my original message at the top of the page remained.

I had this with messages starting 2 new pages today but I didn't rush off to the moderator complaining about it and causing them to make hasty errors. I instead fixed it myself.

It seems obvious that this is some pretty obscure web discussion forum package that was only used because it was free.  If we could only upgrade to a paying package then presumably emails telling us about a new post in a thread would take us to the latest page in the thread and not to the first page for instance?

OK, I'm going off topic here, but when you log in, it show 'new' next to threads with new posts. So, as a regular visitor you aren't going to miss posts to the thread in question.

Indeed, any new thread you won't be subscribed to. But it will of course appear at the top of the list of threads (below Stickies).

I agree, it's not the best forum software, but you just seem to be making an issue out of nothing.

wrote on Jul 8^th, 2005 at 8:13pm:

...I had this with messages starting 2 new pages today but I didn't rush off to the moderator complaining about it and causing them to make hasty errors. I instead fixed it myself...

First of all this problem with starting a new page within an existing thread I didn't know about and I did try and fix the error as I posted again and it showed both my original post and the newer one.  I then proceeded (as would anyone else) to delete one of the two posts.  On doing so, it actually deleted both posts though I only asked it to delete one.  Obviously, Dave had thought the same as me and created a test post but when he attempting to delete it, he accidently deleted the thread.  This mistake could have been made by me or anyone else assuming we also had moderator permission.

Obviously, this is a forum bug and as mentioned in an earlier post, Daniel is looking at alternatives.  I'm not sure of the costs involved with forum software like that used by MSE but hopefully people can recommend an alternative forum software in the 'Site Related' section.

I have now managed to get most of the posts back - Pages 1,2,4,5 are back - just missing page 3.

Please post all new posts related to 'London Bombing 0870 emergency number' to the original thread:

http://www.saynoto0870.com/cgi-bin/forum/YaBB.cgi?board=news;action=display;num=1120745205

Apologies for the inconvenience,

Daniel