Please note that I’ve begun the process of moving this blog to isaacbrocksociety.ca. Therefore, I have shut off comments on every post before 1 June 2012. My goal is that by Tuesday evening, the blog will be completely moved to it’s new site.
Background
The Isaac Brock Society started as an informal group of Canadians who began meeting in person and through email to discuss their US tax and citizenship problems. Some of these people were taking part in a discussion at the Expat Forum in the Fall of 2011. I was in contact with one of them because she had commented on my blog, and when I saw what she was involved in a lively discussion at Expat Forum, I joined in there.
Then, we started to see censorship at the Expat Forum, followed by censorship of attempts to discuss openly the censorship. A whole new genre was born: the Expat Forum moderator joke, but I digress. I was horrified by the Expat Forum’s censorship of our important discussion. So I reached out to some of the people affected by it, and suggested that we begin a new site where we were in control. Then, I was brought into an e-mail conversation of five other Brockers. We decided to start this site at WordPress.com because I offered to administrate it and (1) WordPress.com was what I knew how to do; (2) WordPress blogs are great a product; (3) I didn’t know how to do a forum or run forum software; (4) it was cheap (our current hosting costs have been $25 total).
The Issues
For awhile now, some people have urged me to leave WordPress.com. Here are some of the issues, which have recently converged into a major headache for me and I’ve had to take some steps to address them this week:
- Renounce contacted me early in the week to inform me that WordPress had taken down his very excellent blog. We did not know the reason, but he began to urge me to move the Isaac Brock Society to private servers outside the United States. We speculated about the reasons, including a conspiracy theory that the US government or Obama operatives had put pressure on WordPress to remove his embarrassing site. If that were so, then it was only a matter of time before Isaac Brock would also go down. It turns out that it was an automated spam remover that took his blog down, and WordPress restored the blog the next day. Nevertheless, it was a wake up call to the potential power that the US government and WordPress have over our site.
- The United States claims jurisdiction over servers which are in the Untied States and over dot.com websites. We learned this when bodog.com was shut down. Please note that bodog.ca is still operational. Hence, the advantage of dot.ca domain. Furthermore, the United States claims jurisdiction over e-mail addresses with a dot.com address (gmail.com, hotmail.com, etc.). This means that we should change not only the location of Isaac Brock: We must move this discussion to Canadian servers and we should issue a dot.ca email address to anyone who contributes posts to the site who is currently using a dot.com e-mail address as their point of reference for this blog. Our concern isn’t to remove every claim of jurisdiction of the United States over us, but to reduce the possible pitfalls along the way. Certainly it is clear from bodog.com that the United States government can shut our current operations down at any time.
- We seem to have reached the limit of our ability to back up this blog using the export feature. This is a converging set of circumstances. Indeed, the last time I was able to do the full export file was the day Renounce told me that his blog was down. There may be a work around; however, this becomes seriously more work for us as the sheer volume of the blog grows. As I write we are at 783 posts and 18,019 comments.
- It would be excellent to integrate our forum with our blog on a single domain. Indeed, the person currently hosting the forum insists that we do this before the year is up.
The Plan
My plan is to repatriate the Isaac Brock Society and to move this blog to Canada. I have registered the isaacbrocksociety.ca and purchased hosting from webnames.ca, whose servers are physically located in Vancouver, Canada. I have begun to work with wordpress.org — WordPress’s stand alone software that can be used on any server. It is a steep learning curve for me, and it is draining my time. Not only so, but I’ve found that I am not able to import our blog without technical help–the size limit for importing the blog is 2mb and we are currently at 38mb. In addition, it requires changing the php.ini in order to change the size of files that can be uploaded. I don’t have the technical knowledge to do this. I will have to pay someone for the transfer.
For a cost of $1.50 per month, we will get 100 isaacbrocksociety.ca email addresses and every author will receive one. Authors can set it up to receive these emails via pop3 or have them forwarded to any address that they want. But this will reduce the direct jurisdictional claim of the United States over the content that our authors provide.
One advantage, however, over wordpress.com is that we can generate revenue with our dot.ca. WordPress.com expects a 50% cut on revenues, and so it is hardly worth trying to find sponsors. So my suggestion for dealing with the finances of the blog are as follows:
- My company, Petros Research Inc. will maintain the site and receive sponsorships.
- Those of you who have wished to contribute may send a sponsorship cheque to Petros Research Inc. or find some other means of payment. A receipt will be issued.
- I will create a box at near the top of the blog for sponsors: Sponsor of the month: calgary411 (she will be our first sponsor, as she has already sent me money).
- Suggested price will be $150 per month for professional (e.g., lawyer or accountant) or corporate sponsor; or up to six individual sponsors can send $25+ each. As for pricing, some of you out there may think that this is too little to pay for a spot on a 5000 view per day site. Let me know if you think the pricing is fair or not. Also, the sponsorship is a “donation” towards the maintenance of this site, and it would not imply an endorsement of the services provided.
Since we have to pay someone to make the data transfer, I suggest that we shut down this site for a moment during the transfer. During the shut down, no author will provide new content and I will shut down the comments. I will aim to have this done within 24 hours, and since we have to pay someone to do it, it will probably happen on a week day. The whole site will be moved to Canada, and when start up again, we will operate only over at the new site; I will eventually have hits redirected from this site (dot.com) to our dot.ca. Things may be a little messy for a few days as people get used to the somewhat different software. However, we must deal with this problem now.
I open this topic up to discussion.
(Originally published Jun 1, 2012 @ 8:04)
@Petros, I am like Blaze, a day without Brock what must I do?? I will be lost but I am lost most of the time anyway.. I will definetly contribute..
I agree with Petros’ proposal as it stands, provided comments can still be made anonymously and without registering.
Most, if not all, of us are ex-pats and many have already legally expatriated from the US. It is therefore only fitting that Isaac Brock does the same.
Trust US constitutional protections? I got some swampland in Florida if your interested.
At this point I think that I will be able to move the data myself. It requires moving out small bits of posts at a time, i.e., one author at a time for infrequent authors. And more frequent authors will have their data moved out in 2 mb segments. Every file has to be under 2 mb, and the entire blog is 38 mb. This will be a time consuming task, because I must for each download associate some of the authors to their ID (manually), or otherwise, Tertia (my gravatar) becomes associated with other user’s comments.
Also, one inconvenience is that I cannot assign the same comment number to the new blog, it wants to assign new numbers. This means that the permalinks to comments currently in the blog will not work.
I am thinking at this point that we keep the present blog up as a reference, and turn off comments and the ability to make new posts. Then, invite everyone to continue the discussion at the dot.ca.
I estimate that this will take at least two full days of my time–or I assign it to my assistant.
Thank you Petros for all the time you are putting into doing this. If the new blog works as good as this one, I think everyone will be happy.
It looks like the “custom menus” cannot be recreated easily. I am going to have to redo them by hand (such as the “our resources” menu).
On the brighter side, I was able to add a google search widget–this is a feature not currently available at wordpress.com.
@Petros
Would it be possible to make a donation to IBS via Paypal or some other means workable from overseas? Very grateful for all that you do Petros together with the other Brockers. Quite an amazing group of people.
oohlala, I will be setting up a paypal account very soon with my isaacbrocksociety.ca email address.
@ Petros
Here I am with another question. So it looks like you are going to keep .com and start fresh at .ca. Right? Obviously you will be hanging a big sign on the door “WE HAVE MOVED” before you turn off the lights here. I’m just wondering how the reference site (.com) gets backed up and will that be done on a Canadian server too?
I should have mentioned earlier that I will be happy and eager to make a donation. There is no price I can put on regaining my sanity (I think?), thanks to IBS but I will try. Oohlala is right — Brockers are an amazing group — and I would add that our lead Brocker is literally a Rock.
at least his name literally means “rock”!
I am the person that created, and hosts the forum. I am a big fan of WordPress, but not necessarily the wordpress.com hosting. Right now the forum is hosted at a US provider, but they are not that great for hosting robust forums due to their database connection limit. (They fail to mention this in the fine print!). I pay have been paying around $7/month for YEARS because I already host my own databases that are used for my own stuff, so hosting anything related to this site isn’t going to kill me. The extra of so $50 I spent on registering domains also isn’t going to break me either. By my calculations, you can have 1 domain, and everything integrated for about $195/year with almost unlimited capacity (truly unlimited if you shop around!)
I’m all for integrating everything. After all, What you usually see is a blog as a showcase, and forums are used for comments and off-topic discussion. I’m quite happy with the MyBB functionality and would consider keeping them. In the beginning, I offered to set up the forum as a result of expatforum’s censorship. When people kept posting to the blog, I just kept quiet and waited for things to evolve.
In the forum registration agreement, there is a clause on keeping everyone everywhere that this about being compliant, and not trying to cheat any sort of system, whether the US system or where someone is a resident. What we are doing here is discussing our own issues, compliance issues, and US political issues. I haven’t seen anyone here promoting any illegal behavior. After all, we are the honest people because we DO care about laws. People who usually break laws can care less about laws and staying “legal”. So I am undecided on the issue of needing to use a .ca or other country’s domain name. Yes, the US *does* consider itself to be the owner of .com domains, but then again, those sites that were shut down were blatantly breaking US laws. Last time I checked, we don’t do that here.
Back to integration, if you want to integrate everything, I will be happy to do it since making databases and installations is something that I like to do. It’s not really much of a headache or difficult. It would involve a few hours work on a Sunday. The key is to maintain everything AS IS, until the new copy is running 100%.
I’m also FOR a model of donations, not just to pay for hosting costs, but also maybe for marketing in the future, which could involve changing the names. I’m not against the current name, but as someone said, Isaac Brock was the guy who burned down the White House, so maybe a “softer” name in the future wouldn’t hurt either.
If we’re able to soften the name, then maybe some paid advertisements in major publications would help to get the message out. Furthermore, I can’t help but feel that some energetic people on this site have been more effective at getting the word out in a much shorter period of time than some major groups have accomplished after several years. If anything, there is great potential here.
There are also some strategic issues to discuss with key people should they/we decide to take this from an informal blog to more of an organization. I’m happy to volunteer with money, technological know-how, or managing related projects. What I’m not good at is writing; there are others here that are MUCH better than me.
More details.. I wasn’t that specific:
I’m NOT for the advertising model since:
1- this site involves too many contributors;
2- if you benefit financially from the absurd US laws, then how are you different from many overpriced “professionals” that benefit from the same things? (No, I’m not saying that all professionals are devils. There are some good ones on here, but they know too there are many who just want to make an easy buck.)
3- the site will be labelled as one that promotes “alternatives” to the US system, i.e., expatriation, when we really just want Residency-based taxation and reporting. How can you say otherwise when you are receiving payments from 2nd passport providers, attorneys, or accountants?
There is more, but I wanted to say the main reasons why I think that a donation not-for-profit (or milking) system is the best. I believe we should stay as neutral as possible, but keep the emphasis on the absurdities (and impractical nature) of extraterritorial taxation.
@geez….
Good comments, and wished I had your technical skills, so I could assist in some way besides just contributions. If this move is to be made, (again I question the necessity, but understand why others might think it prudent.) we want it to be seamless, as they say!
BTW, who said you couldn’t write. I think I understood everything you said, well almost! LOL
@Geez, 11.38 am.
Sir Isaac was not involved in burning down the White House. He led the forces that successfully prevented the attempted US invasion of Canada in 1812. The symbolism is a successful defence against extraterritorial incursion.
The Brock Army of 2012 is, of course, a non-violent one. The keyboard is mightier than the sword!
@pacifica777, ok you got me on that one, the history I posted was written by a school child, but I thought it was cute nonetheless. Sir Brock certainly was not involved in the burning of Washington and the White House itself in 1814, as he had died in battle on October 13, 1812. Mark that date Brockers!
I confess to being a chronic lurker. I read almost all of the conversations, usually on my phone. Since I’m too old to be able to do very much keyboarding on an iPhone, participation would have to wait until I was at a real keyboard. I also live in the west and it seems a lot of conversations start in more eastern time zones. By the time I am in a place to enter into the discussion, my contributions would be redundant. I would bw jumping on a moving train.
So, for what it’s worth, here are my opinions. I’d like to think that maybe I represent the feelings of a good number of lurkers:
1. Yes, it would be good to repatriate (see–I’m weighing in after repatriation has already started!). If not for security reasons, then because of principle. I don’t want this to be American-based.
I confess that I am naive when it comes to security issues but, while it might not be an issue right now or in the near future, some of the things that have been legislated in the US recently, and some of the things that are being proposed, are over the top. When I am in conversations about my tax issues, people can’t believe this is possible. To be sure, as @Em pointed out, we are not immune to this loss of freedom in Canada either.
2. I don’t want to see advertising if possible. I’d support the donation route first. I will be a financial supporter and will start as soon as the PayPal option is set up.
3. I support combining the forum with the blog. I think would be much more inclined to participate on in the forum format.
4. Isaac Brock rocks!! This amazing group of people are proving to be an increasingly powerful force in making these issues more widely known. And, IBS has been incredibly valuable for me personally in sorting out my own thinking and actions. Woodrow Wilson said, “I not only use all the brains that I have, but all I can borrow.” Thanks all for your intelligent and insightful contributions and analysis. I’ve borrowed your brains a lot.
@Karcan, I know what you mean about coming in at the end of a conversation, but I’m sure your comments would be welcome anyway. Sometimes the comments are added days later as we all try to catch up. Good that participants are from different time zones – up early, or up late, there is often someone else on!
@Badger: Or to use bubblebustin’s recent term “Brocking Around The Clock.” Love it–although I’m not one of the multitude who seem to do it.
@blaze, I like bubblebustin’s phrase about ‘Brocking Around the Clock’ – very apt! Citizenship-based taxation is akin to caffeine – prevents one from sleeping. It’s also been a diet aid and very slimming.
@ Geeez, Thanks for the offer of technical help. I may take you up on it.
As for paying for advertising elsewhere, my first concern is to pay bills. As I said to Just Me above, the time I spend on Isaac Brock is lost money because I have a full time research assistant. Every minute I spend on this project is time taken away from the research project for which I hired my assistant. Donations sent to Isaac Brock Society would provide me a financial justification for devoting time to it. Thus, I greatly appreciate all those who offer to help!
LOL, all! @Karcan, there will always be someone east of you no matter where you are. I personally love getting up to posts from the other side of the world like NZ, Europe, and I’m sure they feel the same about ours from here.
@badger, I eat more when I’m stressed!
@Karcan: Welcome. Of course, you have much to add. Great minds think alike. One of my first entries when I discovered Brock in January was Isaac Brock Rocks.
Badger: A slimming aid? I wish! For me, it’s the opposite. Chocolate is a great antidote to stress. Laura Secord and Isaac Brock are a winning combination!
@Badger, I have to agree, I’m a little PORKier than I was, since I have no CLOSURE to the SPILLOVER of this RADIOACTIVE ATTACK known as citizenbased taxation.
Another ‘unintended consequence’ of citizenship based taxation.
On this weight issue. My husband and I always joke that on many polls Canadians come out 50/50. I lost 6 pounds then gained 50% back. 🙂
I too am so grateful for IBS and would be happy to donate when I can. 🙂