It is with a huge pleasure that I can announce some very good and long waited news: the new Saker blog is now up and running and you can use either of the two following links to access it:
and
My wonderful IT team (A, F and MB - thanks guys!!) put a lot of work into importing seven years worth of posts and comments and to add a host of improvements. For example, from now on you will be able to sign on using a host of different social media networks. Anonymous comments will still allowed.
Please pay careful attention to the "ABOUT" menu and its submenus including, most importantly, the new moderation policy. FYI - I will be doing all the moderation myself, but these rules will be very strictly enforced. I consider these rules to be both very minimalistic, vitally important and very permissible. I have put up with a amazing amount of arrogant and nasty trolling here because of my naivete and because originally this blog had a full "anything goes/zero censorship" policy. Now I know better and I have learned it the hard way.
Please look around the site and please take a look at the different pages and let me know what you think, preferable by posting your likes/dislikes as comments on the new blog (please no private emails or comments here, okay?).
I will continue double-posting here and on the new blog for at least one more month until all the kinks problems and other bugs and issues are resolved. However,
Next Monday, October 13 I will close all comments on this blog (I mean the original vineyardsaker.blogspot.com) and you will only be able to post comments on the new blog.
After the new blog's minor issues will be solved (in a month or so) I will "freeze" this blog (again, I mean the original vineyardsaker.blogspot.com) and thus stop double-posting. This means that I will not delete it and I will keep it as a repository of old articles and, if needed, as a well known fallback option should an attack (of any nature) be successful on the new blog.
So if suddenly all the Saker blogs including http://www.thesaker.net/ and http://vineyardsaker.net/ all go off-line and you can always try to come back here to get an update about the situation.
Also, in preparation for the worst be hoping for the best, the following mirrors do currently exist. I will maintain the ones I own, but the three others do not depend on me and while I hope that they will remain up and running I cannot guarantee that:
run by me:
http://thesaker.ucoz.com/blog
https://thesaker.wordpress.com/
run by friends:
https://wikispooks.com/VS/
http://info.scoop.co.nz/Saker_Analytics
https://vineyardsaker.wordpress.com/
Finally, please write down the following email addresses you can reach me at:
vineyardsaker@gmail.com (primary)
vineyardsaker@mail.ru (main backup)
thesaker@unseen.is (only for secure communications)
You might wonder why I am so paranoid. Well, first, I am paranoid by nature, nurture, training, education, professional inclination and experience. But most importantly, I know that we are really making a difference. Not only does this blog - according to Google - get anywhere between 20'000+ visitors per day (on a very quiet day) to an incredible 70'000 visitors in one day on August 31st (when events accelerated in the Ukraine), but the other four Saker Blogs - Russian, French, German and Oceania - are also doing very well, as are their associated YouTube channels. Even better, I can already make the following pre-announcement:
We are working on two more Saker Blogs: Spanish and Serbian! There also appears to be interest in creating a Dutch Saker Blog.
Add to this a very good collaboration with the great Russia Insider community of contributors and you will see that my paranoia is well-founded. The recent Saker-bashing campaign - they are still at it - has convinced me that there are interests out there which are extremely annoyed by what the Saker community is doing. Their attempts at smearing and discrediting me ended up backfiring at them (they lost a lot of credibility in the process) but I don't think that they will stop at that. I expect both legal and technical challenges next, hence the time it took to prepare and secure the new blog in legal and technical terms. Without going into any details, let's just say that we have put a great deal of redundancy and survivability into the new blog.
Finally, I apologize for the little time I have had to write for this blog. I can promise you that all that time was spent in developing and strengthening our Saker community and that, God willing, things should return to some degree of normalcy soon.
Okay - your turn now: what do you think about all that?
Please let us all know what does not work and is still buggy (the CAPTCHAs for anonymous posting are not working for me, I think that I will completely remove the CAPTCHAs) and then please be patient while we fix it.
Again - please post your replies on the NEW blog's (http://www.thesaker.net/ ) Open Thread created for that purpose! But if you *cannot* post there due to a technical reasons like some bug or mis-configured option, then please do post here.
Kind regards and many thanks to all,
The Saker
