TIWWA

You asked. We listened! Many of our long time members and visitors will be familiar with the cool 'millennium-istic' t-shirt designs created by our hugely talented @ENGINECOMICS. However a lot of newer fans of the show and many first time around missed out on the opportunity to own one or more, and when they saw some images of them last year, the message was very clear. We heard you! In order to help support our website and community forums, we've tried ads and we recently launched our own community store here offering premium member accounts with ad-free community browsing to help keep the site going. Sadly, despite the extra features, take up so far has been very disappointing. I'm therefore very pleased to confirm that following discussions, Barry has kindly donated his range of inspired designs with obscure references to many of your most favourite episodes. He will make no income from them himself. I'm delighted to announce the launch of M-TIWWA's new clothing and apparel stores, utilising Spreadshirt's quality print on demand service combined with quality clothing and apparel, with locations in the US and EU and therefore offering affordable shipping to the US, Canada, the UK and Europe. m-tiwwa_clothing_standard_v2.pdf I've recently set up a new shorter domain for the site (m-tiwwa.net) and set up links that redirect to the new stores. The tiwwa.info domain will still shortcut you to our community forums. The store covering the UK and Europe is now open and the first designs are now available at: m-tiwwa.net/uk-eu-store The US/Canada store will be available very soon at: m-tiwwa.net/us-store I'd like to extend my huge gratitude and appreciation to Barry Renshaw for his kindness and support in making his art available again for more to enjoy, and for hopefully helping keep the site going. You can currently take advantage of a 15% store launch discount for a limited time, plus other discounts and free shipping offers as and when they become available, courtesy of Spreadshirt. Thank everyone for your ongoing support. Graham View/comment on this article!

We've just upgraded to the next level of cloud VPS hosting. 48 unlocked CPUs, increased super fast SSD storage and double the RAM! Roedecker would be proud! And the next major update of our community suite software is on the way, with some great new features to enhance our forums that you'll love! View/comment on this article!

It's October 13th once again so we'd like to join Millennium and X-Files fans in wishing Chris Carter a very Happy Birthday! Christopher Carl Carter was born 62 years ago today in October 1956, the elder son of William and Catherine Carter. You can learn more about him via Libby's Chris Carter crew profile. Will you be celebrating Ten Thirteen Day with a few favourite episodes from your Millennium and X-Files box-sets? If so, let us know which episodes and series you choose. View the original article at Millennium-ThisIsWhoWeAre.net

Unless you've been living under a rock, on Mars or have possibly been abducted by The Polaroid Stalker, you will have no doubt heard about changes to Privacy and Data Protection in Europe called General Data Protection Regulation (or GDPR for short). The legislation in reality effects and improves the rights of everyone. As you would expect, we have always respected your privacy and the processing of your personal data/information, and we will continue to do so. Our community software suite recently received additional functionality and tools to better facilitate compliance with the new GDPR legislation. We have therefore recently made enhancements to our Privacy Policy, which take effect from May 26th, 2018. Our Privacy policy increases transparency, explains our role and responsibilities in terms of storing, using and safeguarding your data. It explains what you can expect if you make contact with us and use our services. It also serves as an introduction to your rights under GDPR. There are understandably lots of interpretations, wild claims and opinions on GDPR. However, we believe GDPR isn't about ruining your enjoyment of the internet, it's good news for all of us. We manage an awesome website, we're open and transparent, but we're not lawyers or GDPR experts. So for further information and better understanding, we highly recommend reading the guidance available at the ICO website, which you can find here. We have also taken the opportunity to review and update our Guidelines. Thank you for your time, understanding and for your continued use of our website. View/comment on this article!

Unless you've been living under a rock, on Mars or have possibly been abducted by The Polaroid Stalker, you will have no doubt heard about changes to Privacy and Data Protection in Europe called General Data Protection Regulation (or GDPR for short). The legislation in reality effects and improves the rights of everyone. As you would expect, we have always respected your privacy and the processing of your personal data/information, and we will continue to do so. Our community software suite recently received additional functionality and tools to better facilitate compliance with the new GDPR legislation. We have therefore recently made enhancements to our Privacy Policy, which take effect from May 26th, 2018. Our Privacy policy increases transparency, explains our role and responsibilities in terms of storing, using and safeguarding your data. It explains what you can expect if you make contact with us and use our services. It also serves as an introduction to your rights under GDPR. There are understandably lots of interpretations, wild claims and opinions on GDPR. However, we believe GDPR isn't about ruining your enjoyment of the internet, it's good news for all of us. We manage an awesome website, we're open and transparent, but we're not lawyers or GDPR experts. So for further information and better understanding, we highly recommend the reading the guidance available at the ICO website, which you can find here. We have also taken the opportunity to review and update our Guidelines. Thank you for your time, understanding and for your continued use of our website. View the blog entry & optionally add your comments.

Dear TIWWA members and visitors, Nothing to be alarmed about, but I would like to extend apologies for any inconvenience you may have experienced with slow responses or speed with the website in the last few days. Unfortunately we have intermittently been receiving a high amount of illegitimate web traffic, effectively hammering away at the server in what appears to be a crude attempt to knock our server or website offline. As you may know such is the nature of DDoS or 'Distributed Denial of Service' attacks, the hackers (possibly someone who has watched too many episode of Mr Robot) often use a one or more, sometimes a whole network of compromised computers or devices to try and take random or specific servers down by bombarding their firewall and server software with traffic or hits. Initially it was coming from Italy, then the US, then South America. We can manually kill off the Apache server process each time and restart it, but after a while it starts up again, sometimes soon or after a few hours. Eventually they will get bored with door rattling and move on, especially since we're not a big company website, power station etc. Our web-hosting company has elevated the issue to a more senior tier of support staff who have been working hard to resolve the issues, however we may start using Cloudflare and routing through their network behind the scenes for extra protection, as they provide a network service to assist with this sort of issue. If so, the website may be inaccessible for a short while. We may also have to enable additional firewall rules, which potentially could cause you to receive a blocked or forbidden error messages in your browser if your use or visit to the site triggers a false positive. Such advanced rules are very sensitive, and require a lot of fine tuning and extra time to configure, so are best avoided if possible. I want to reassure you that we have no reason to believe the website or server has been compromised or hacked in any way, or personal information taken. We take security seriously. We also have automatic backups available, and all non-public user account related personal information such as e-mail addresses, passwords etc are fully encrypted, as you would rightly expect. This is one reason why we licence use of professional community software with regular updates rather than use free software, and we also automatically encrypt all traffic between our server and your browser when you visit our site. We also use another company to probe our server infrastructure, encryption levels and website each week for potential security issues. Thank you bearing with us. Handy to know tips from Roedecker Contrary to first impressions, he actually knows what he's doing... Remember in general to always use ideally single use, strong passwords on your websites and devices, in particular your Google or other email accounts which if compromised could be used to change or hack your social media and website accounts. Password managers are well recommended, in particular LastPass and 1Pass are recommended. https://uk.pcmag.com/password-managers-products/4296/guide/the-best-password-managers-of-2018 https://www.techradar.com/news/software/applications/the-best-password-manager-1325845 https://www.cnet.com/news/the-best-password-managers-directory/ Always use a good, up to date Antivirus software, ideally combined with separate anti-malware software such as Malwarebytes. These days, on Windows 10, Microsoft's built-in antivirus is regarded as very good. Avast is excellent for free software, I used it for over 10 years, but tends to nag with somewhat, scaremongering pop ups to buy the full version. Kapaskey, Mcaffee and Symantec are probably best avoided. Should you have any concerns about account security in general, you may be unaware but we also support so-called 'two factor' account protection. Did you know we support Google Authenticator! If would like to make use of the popular Google Authenticator service which you can configure in your user account settings, it is free and optional for non-staff members. Very handy if you don't use a password manager service or tend to read-use the same password for multiple sites. Once activated, it allows you to require anyone accessing your account from a new device or browser for the first time or after you sign out, to enter a one time code sent to your phone or mobile device by Google, either by text message or via the Google Authenticator app (if you have it installed on your mobile devices). If the code is not correctly entered before it expires, access is denied, so without access to your device, nobody can in theory access your account. I can't stress this enough to everyone with a Google Account these days, I very strongly recommended activating Google 2FA/Google Authenticator to access your Google Account, but you can also use it here if you want and on many other websites and apps too. Adding an extra layer... We also have the optional 3 Security Question/Answers option if you prefer, or you can use both. You can set up questions and answers that hopefully only you would know the correct answers to (don't share too much info on social media!), Either of these options are are available in your Account Security settings and are useful if you feel you would like to add an extra layer of protection to your account. You may also have noticed a new section after our last big update that provides device and browser usage history (Recently Used Devices). If you also use a VPN service however, the info will obviously be incorrect. The Old Man View/comment on this article!

Welcome to our first update for 2018! The following update isn't that exciting but may be of interest to some more than others but it heralds a faster, more responsive Millennium website experience, which I'm hoping you will notice as from today. As you might expect, our website has grown significantly over the last 15 years and our website community software has become more complex and feature-laden also. Last year, we needed to upgrade to a more powerful cloud-based VPS web hosting solution using SSD (solid state drives) with access to 48 unlocked CPU cores, which saw massive performance increases and cuts to page loading times but also permits more opportunity to tweak performance. As a matter of course, I regularly monitor reports from GTMetrix and other sites such as Page Speed and Pingdom to ensure the site and server is optimised and efficient. Three months ago, after learning more about the dark art of server management whilst I've been ill and waiting for an operation for 12 months, I installed and activated Zend Opcache on the server which is a database caching service. This basically caches database queries so that the results are reused if possible when the same query is repeated again. This means pages are generated more quickly, and we saw an improvement in responsive page loading again, the site just seemed noticeably more snappy! One or two extra improvements never hurt, so earlier today, I got into my Brian Roedecker mode and activated some significantly babe-a-licious server side changes to provide further performance improvements, and to ensure quicker page loading times in order to improve your experience at TIWWA. Amazon S3 Cloud Storage Firstly, our TIWWA community website now makes use of Amazon S3 cloud storage to host the majority of our uploaded member's file attachments and image content. This will free-up space and save resources on the main server. Not only does this include our theme images, CSS and theme templates, but also all emoticons, reactions, profile photos, profile blog and calendar cover images etc, and all existing and future file and image attachments have been shunted over to S3. All member uploaded attachments are now stored on Amazon's S3 service. The S3 cloud servers provide robust storage, and fast delivery of the many attachments and images that make up the TIWWA website. Since the majority of our members and visitors are based on the west coast of the US, I opted to configure the S3 storage bucket to be hosted in N California. Our much loved @beerbelch should see a huge boost! You can learn more here if you are interested, and see a neat video on how it works here: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/ Amazon Cloudfront CDN The second important feature we've activated is Amazon's Cloudfront which is their powerful Content Delivery Network. A CDN takes files, images and attachments and distributes them across the world to various endpoints, where they are mirrored and cached. We've hooked it up to our new S3 cloud storage server in Northern California, so the content is effectively stored much closer to our members and visitors, where ever they reside. The Amazon CloudFront content delivery network is built on the expanding global AWS infrastructure that includes 44 Availability Zones within 16 geographic regions today, with announced plans for 14 more Availability Zones and five more Regions in China, France, Hong Kong, Sweden, and a second AWS GovCloud Region in the US. Amazon CloudFront has 113 Points of Presence (102 Edge Locations and 11 Regional Edge Caches) in 56 cities across 24 countries. What this means in simple terms, is that when say @Libby, myself or other users who access TIWWA in the UK, will now access copies of the image and file content hosted on Amazon's S3 servers mirrored in the UK. Members based in Europe like Alex @SadEyes or @Viivi or the US like @Earthnut and @Walkabout will be accessing the same content from their nearest endpoint. This means a huge boost in page loading times, as well as many other CDN related security and reliability benefits. Learn more: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/ TL;DR *Faster loading and less waiting allows more time for other nice things in life, like pizza! The process isn't fully completed yet, so please bear with us as we complete the transfer of our remaining images and files across to Amazon S3. View/comment on this article!

Today marks the 15th anniversary of This Is Who We Are, our Millennium community forums! TIWWA first went live on December 1st 2002 and has since grown to become the largest, respected and most feature-laden Millennium fan community available online. This wouldn't... Read more... View the original article at Millennium-ThisIsWhoWeAre.net

Today marks the 15th anniversary of This Is Who We Are, our Millennium community forums! TIWWA first went live on December 1st 2002 and has since grown to become the largest, respected and most feature-laden Millennium fan community available online. This wouldn't... Read more... View the original article at Millennium-ThisIsWhoWeAre.net

La-La Land Records are currently running a one-week only sales promotion dedicated to soundtracks from the nineties, which includes some great reductions on both available volumes of Mark Snow's stunning Millennium Soundtrack. The first 2-CD Millennium Volume One is available for only $10, discounted from $24.98. The second 2-CD set Millennium Volume Two is available for only $15, discounted from $24.98. La-La Land's announcement reads: "NIFTY 90's SPECIAL! ONE WEEK ONLY! The 1990's generated some of the most amazing contemporary scores in cinema! Join us in celebrating this period with incredible prices on the following selected group of some of the decade's most exciting scores!". This is an ideal opportunity to buy music from Chris Carter's Millennium, Thank you La-La Land Records and Mark Snow for making these long-awaited releases possible. Related links: Millennium Music section Feature: Millennium Limited Edition Original Soundtrack (Volume 1) by Mark Snow View the original article at Millennium-ThisIsWhoWeAre.net

It's October 13th so we'd like to join Millennium and X-Files fans in wishing Chris Carter a very Happy Birthday! Christopher Carl Carter was born 61 years ago today in October 1956, the elder son of William and Catherine Carter. You can learn more about him via Libby's Chris Carter's Millennium crew profile. Will you be celebrating Ten Thirteen Day with a few favourite episodes from your box sets? Is so, let us know which episodes and series you choose. View the original article at Millennium-ThisIsWhoWeAre.net

Entertainment news website Deadline have recently published an interesting interview with Millennium creator, Chris Carter. Although primarily focused on The X-Files due to the forthcoming eleventh season due in 2018, Chris was able to add some thoughts on Millennium which are always welcomed by appreciative fans of both series. Just prior, Chris had discussed where he felt The X-Files fitted into the Donald Trump era, where "... we're looking at a world where now truth is thrown out the window and conspiracy is now seemingly the center. Everything's been turned on its head and that's an interesting time to be telling X-Files stories." DEADLINE: In such times, are there other shows you'd like to resurrect? CARTER: I think Millennium would be a show that would have more life in it but no one's ever spoken seriously to me about that. DEADLINE: Odd.. CARTER: Yeah, I always feel that there are more of those stories to tell as well. After three seasons, we pulled the plug on that show but the ratings were still very good so I think that there is a new approach to that show building on the solid foundation that was already there. Related link: Millennium Ratings, Charts and Analysis. Read the full and interesting interview at Deadline (contains potential X-Files spoilers): The X-Files Creator Chris Carter On Making More Seasons, Lone Gunmen's Return & Millennium - NY Comic Con View the original article at Millennium-ThisIsWhoWeAre.net

Entertainment news website Deadline have recently published an interesting interview with Millennium creator, Chris Carter. Although primarily focused on The X-Files due to the forthcoming eleventh season due in 2018, Chris was able to add some thoughts on Millennium which are always welcomed by appreciative fans of both series. Just prior, Chris had discussed where he felt The X-Files fitted into the Donald Trump era, where "... we're looking at a world where now truth is thrown out the window and conspiracy is now seemingly the center. Everything's been turned on its head and that's an interesting time to be telling X-Files stories." DEADLINE: In such times, are there other shows you'd like to resurrect? CARTER: I think Millennium would be a show that would have more life in it but no one's ever spoken seriously to me about that. DEADLINE: Odd.. CARTER: Yeah, I always feel that there are more of those stories to tell as well. After three seasons, we pulled the plug on that show but the ratings were still very good so I think that there is a new approach to that show building on the solid foundation that was already there. Related link: Millennium Ratings, Charts and Analysis Read the full and interesting interview at Deadline (contains potential X-Files spoilers): The X-Files Creator Chris Carter On Making More Seasons, Lone Gunmen's Return & Millennium - NY Comic Con View the original article at Millennium-ThisIsWhoWeAre.net

This entry is about our TIWWA Community Suite 4.2 release. It is a new feature available to all registered members. TIWWA's Community Suite software has long had a reputation system; first we had a simple up/down number-based system, later updated to introduce a Likes system, tied in with our reputation system. We're pleased to introduce the latest updates to the reputation system, which we think you'll love: Reactions. Quite simply, reactions allow users to offer more fine-grained sentiments towards posted content than a simple 'like'. Reactions are now in common use on many popular social networks, and so users may expect to be able to be more nuanced in their response to something they see here at TIWWA. A little more interesting than simply 'liking' a post, blog entry, gallery image, download review or comment; but of course, 'like' is still an option! Let's see how they work in an example forum post, and then cover the options you'll have available:- At first glance it may look a little confusing but what you see above is a looping animation showing the default Reactions setup, below a post or comment. First it shows the logged-in user clicking on the React feature's 'Like' blue love button (he he - Love is blue - see what I did there?! ). Then it shows the user clicking on it again to see the other available react options in case they want to change from 'Like' to a different one, then selecting 'Confused'. Then it shows the user removing their chosen reaction to the post completely with the X (Remove) button. The gif then loops around to show you again. The software includes 5 reactions by default, but we can add more of our own, tailored to Millennium and our members: Like Thanks Confused Sad Haha Will we still see a total summary for all our posts/comments like the current reputation? A user's total reputation count is still shown alongside their content and in their profile, of course. Can we see who reacted to a post, similar to how we can currently see who 'liked' our posts/comments? As you'd expect, you can click individual reaction counts (or the overall reputation score, if we enable that setting) to view who reacted to the content in a small pop-up window. (On touch devices, on-hover functionality is not suitable, and so for these devices the reactions UI looks slightly different, but works the same). Where can we use Reactions? You'll be able to use reactions anywhere on our site where you can currently like a post, comment or any other price of content. Reactions play well with all areas of the suite, including the new Recommended Replies: ...and see them in activity streams... We hope you're looking forward to this new feature. It's already been a hit on the developer's internal testing site, and we're looking forward to seeing how we can customise it for use on our own community. More to come soon on what we'll be seeing later this summer! View/comment on this article!

We are happy to introduce the next major feature that will be available at This Is Who We Are - Clubs. Clubs are a brand new way of supporting fun, on or off-topic sub-communities within our site, in other words, providing new improved 'social group' functionality. Let's take a look at the concept with a few demo example screenshots from the software developer's beta test site, and then go over what Clubs are capable of doing! (Above: The Club directory. This is similar to the main forum index page) (Above: A Club homepage, essentially what a specific Club will look like) (Above: Club member listing, showing a particular Club's creators and also the members of this social group.) (Above: Example of content within a club; topics, in this case.) There's a lot to digest there! Let's go over the basic functionality... Club Types Four types of club are available, we may enable some or all here at TIWWA:- Public clubs Clubs that anyone can see and participate in without joining. Open club Clubs that anyone can see and join. Closed club Clubs that anyone can see in the directory, but joining must be approved by a Club Leader or Club Moderator. Non-club-members who view the club will only see the member list - not the recent activity or content areas. Private club Clubs that do not show in public, and users must be invited by a Club Leader or Club Moderator As the site staff, we can of course configure which club types can be created and by whom. We could, for example, enables members to create public and open clubs, but allow a "VIP" group to also create Closed and Private clubs. Obviously we need to give this thought and see how things develop. Club Users Each club has three levels of user: Leader A leader has all of the permissions of a moderator, and can add other moderators. They can also add content areas (see below). The club owner is automatically a leader. Moderators Moderators, as the name implies, have the ability to moderate content posted within the club. We can define which moderator tools can be used. We could, for example, prevent any content being deleted from clubs, but allow it to be hidden. Moderators can also remove members from a club. Users Anyone else that joins the club. TIWWA's staff (Elder administrator and moderator groups), are able to moderate content in any Club regardless of whether they are a member of it. Clubs can be created by any TIWWA user who has permission. As you would expect, this is controlled by our regular member group permission settings, so we may make available Club creation facilities to Patrons, or other specific groups. For closed clubs, there's an approval process. Users can request to join and the request must be approved by the Club's leader. Leaders get a notification when a user requests to join; the user gets a notification when their request is approved or denied. (Above: Approving and declining join requests.) Club Content Club Leaders can add a variety of content areas to their club - forums, calendars, blogs and so on. It's important to note that these content areas are fully functional just as if they existed as a top-level admin created area. They will appear in search results, activity streams, users can follow them, embed links to them, and so on. If a user has permission to see a forum (for example) within a club it will behave exactly like other forums they see - and the same for all other kinds of content. Each content area a leader adds can have a custom title, and will appear in the club navigation. This means, for example, that you can have multiple forums within a club, and give each a different name. (Above: Adding content areas to a Club.) Club Custom Fields Clubs also support custom fields. Custom fields are defined by the site administrator and can be filled in by Club Owners. The values they enter are shown (along with the club description) on the club homepage. (Above: Custom fields in a car-themed club.) On the Club Directory page, users can filter the list of clubs by the custom club fields if they want to. (Above: Filtering clubs.) Club Locations Clubs have built-in support for Google Maps, allowing users to specify an optional physical location for their club. Let's say we run a community for car enthusiasts; each club might be tied to a particular region's meetup. The Club Owner specifies the location when setting up the club, and clubs are then shown on map on the directory page: (Above: Club locations.) And within a club, the location is shown too: Club Display We offer two ways to display club headers within the club - the standard way, shown in the screenshots you've seen up to this point, but we also have a sidebar option. This is something the admin sets globally for the whole TIWWA site, rather than per-club. This is useful if our site design doesn't facilitate another horizontal banner taking up valuable screen real-estate; moving the club banner to the sidebar alleviates this pressure on vertical space. Using Clubs There's a lot of scope for using clubs beyond allowing TIWWA's members to create their own groups. We do not even have to call them "clubs" if that does not suit our case. For example, we could rename Clubs to "Social Groups". This would allow each social group to have its own community, with its own forums, gallery, file sharing and so on, private and separate from other social groups. We could use Clubs for special events or as a home for project teams, like our TIWWA Black Coats community volunteers. The first that occurred to me is that Members will be able to expand on specific aspects of Millennium that interests them, perhaps the bahavioural science and criminology aspects, or Legion, Angels, or perhaps an expanded Mark Snow themed area. Secondly, I can see huge potential for off-topic content, expanding further on some of the existing themes in our off-topic forums... A club for The Donut Hole, a club for Lucy's Pantry, or a TV and Movie Club. You may be inspired to create a club for The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, perhaps a club for the weather, or great 80's TV shows, or a club for horror movies or any other movie genre or sub-genre, cult television series, or for a favourite actor, artist, writer or musician. Like the idea of clubs? Inspired to create one? Let us know... And of course, you don't need to bother with Clubs if you don't want to! View/comment on this article!