Last update: 04/02/2024
Mission and Constitution ( paraphrased from justin_le )
The mission of the Endless-Sphere can be summarized by the following 5 points:
Basic site info
Ownership/Operations
Technical Information
Mission and Constitution ( paraphrased from justin_le )
The mission of the Endless-Sphere can be summarized by the following 5 points:
- ES is a hangout and gathering place for all those who are involved with, interested in, or knowledgeable about ebikes and EV technology.
- ES is dedicated to sharing and spreading accurate knowledge about ebikes and other light electric vehicles and their underlying components. For instance, sales pitches or announcements with a clear commercial bias are not generally welcome outside of our Online Market, while independent analysis and first hand experience is highly regarded.
- ES is here to be a helpful resource to those endeavoring to build their own personal EVs. This is a community that is happy to support your DIY project with advice and troubleshooting help, and there is a trove of technical know-how and valuable build info built up over years for your reference.
- ES encourages entrepreneurship and innovations that advance the state of EV technology to the overall community benefit. ES users are often first to get their hands on new products and test them to their limits, and many ES members end up turning their own custom designed components into successful side businesses.
- ES is dedicated both continuing, and archiving the story of the ebike movement for posterity. We believe that the rise of LEV’s could be a disruptive force in the world that may be worthy of the history books. To that end, all content that is submitted to ES, whether direct or through a link, will be considered part of the official record that we intend to keep.
Basic site info
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Who is this site for? | Anyone interested in DIY Electric vehicle building  |
| Do you allow discussion of non-legal bicycles? | Yes. We are a global forum and ebike laws, and their application, vary across the globe, and can even vary from city to city. It's technically impossible to have a 'standard' to hold the forum to. We leave it up to our users to find out and chose how to navigate their local laws. |
| What are the rules? | Please see: The rules of Endless Sphere |
| Who started the site? | KnightMB started the site in 2006. |
| How have you been around so long? | It's quite simple, we provide a stable place to discuss ebikes, don't get in our user's way with heavy handed moderation, and don't have an advertisement every square inch. |
| What does the name 'Endless Sphere' mean? | Endless-sphere was actually the name of KnightMB's internet hosting company. So, technically, the forum never had a name of it's own. After consulting our members and much debate, we decided to keep the name because most members preferred it. Some would say 'Endless Sphere' reflects our nature as a global ebike forum today. |
Ownership/Operations
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Who owns the forum? | Justin Le. |
| Who pays the bill for hosting, maintenance, and coding? | Since ~2010, Justin Le has paid for this. |
| Who is the Manager of the forum? | Neptronix is current the forum manager, however, the moderation team and our members are also involved in making decisions about the site. |
| Who pays for moderation? | Moderation is a 100% volunteer effort and moderators are chosen on the basis of prior community involvement and good judgement. |
| Does the owner of the site interfere with moderation/content? | No; an explicit promise was made to stay out of controlling the content of ES for the benefit of the DIY EV community as a whole; the primary decision makers are the ES moderation team and Manager. |
| Why don't you have ads/donations? | We would like to unburden the viewer of needing to pay for access to this resource and remain without commercial conflicts of interest as much as possible. Most internet forums have been lost to commercial conflicts and we are not interested in seeing this long running resource trashed by that. |
Technical Information
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Who do i contact for tech support? | Please post a message in the 'forum rules and features' area. |
| Who is the 'ES Dev team'? | The ES Dev Team consists of Neptronix and Kauaicycler. |
| What webhost does ES use? | Currently we are using Amazon Web Services, but are considering moving to Hetzner for lower costs. |
| What software does the forum run? | Xenforo 2.x, Image Tender for advanced image recompression, various Xenforo extensions, and forum maintenance tools built on the Zerolith framework. |
| Do you have backups? | Yes, we have rolling backups on a separate disk, and occasional full server image backups. The backups are designed so that the site can be reconstructed in approx 4 hours in the event of a failure. |
| How do you prevent content rot? | 1. As of 2022, when an image is linked from an external source, our server retains a copy, and serves that copy. This prevents the forum from losing that image. 2. We make it as easy as possible allow you to upload images without caring about their size by using an advanced image processing tool that resizes and recompresses the image, much like how it would work on a social media site. This saves us 68% bandwidth and disk usage, so we can be very liberal about allowing image uploads. Other websites running forum software often have to put restrictions on uploads to reduce their hosting costs for images, but we don't! As of current, we do not have a technology to address the need for uploading video. |
| What do you do to protect my privacy? | ES 2.0 uses the bare minimum of external third party services; the only third party services we use are: - AWS for outbound email - Stopforumspam for quickly identifying spammers - Google Analytics for assessing our forum traffic and use - A third party backup provider, using extremely high grade encryption and 2FA for login so that even if backups are stolen, it would take more than a human lifetime to decrypt - Our development machines have the same high security setup as the production servers and are used in a an isolated environment. Sensitive user information is also removed in our development environments. - If someone is threatening your privacy ( doxing ), we have a zero tolerance rule about that. |
| What do you do to protect my security? | - ES 2.0 runs Xenforo, which allows for optional email-based 2FA. We suggest you use it. - We have brute force password cracking protection in all places you'd enter a password. - We have countermeasures against DDOS attacks that can prevent accidental disclosure of information. - We update our software frequently. - The server itself is otherwise configured to a higher than average security spec for an internet forum. |
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