By the way I should have said there are three unique search engines on the OCF site
http://www.oralcancerfoundation.org/search.htmAlso OCF has many different servers that house different parts of the foundation's web site. To those on the site this seems seamless when they travel from one to the other, but it you look at the URL in the top of the pages as you move around OCF you can tell when you are changing sites and servers.
The servers that handle our donations and the donor drive event function of the pages where credit cards are used are separate from everything else. They are heavily encrypted with software that not only prevents intrusion, but also prevents OCF from know too much about you. For instance if you donate with a credit card, we never get to see anything but the last four digits. If we look at the data on that server it is scrambled to look like gibberish to us, and only our financial banking partners get to see things.
The forum that you are on now is on a separate set of servers. It gets not only a lot of traffic, mostly thousands of worldwide lurkers that do not actually post, but it also has to archive lots of data, as even with regular pruning of old posts that have no useful information in them out of it, it still averages about 160,000 conversations at any given time. because of the need to search so many unique locations/data points it has its own dedicated search engine so that it will operate quickly. We cannot keep the Google search engine out of it (like most things on the web) and the spiders that you see on the forum home page are search engine web bots wandering around it. Showing them to you reminds you that very little on the web is not cataloged, and here you should not use your real names, (unless you don't care about the cancer connection to you like me) the names of your employer, and those kinds of personal details. Yes I know you share it all on Facebook already, and they of course make their billions of dollars selling every detail you reveal about yourself there to the same kinds of companies� Facebook isn't really free either, and people put up their most intimate details of their life and history there willingly to be sold to millions of interested companies and other entities. Google, Bing and everyone else that provide that "free search service" to you make billions of dollars a year. They know everything you have searched for going back a decade or more, and they well that information to email selling companies that want to target their sales pitch to you. Nothing is free, and nothing on the web is 100% private. So the web robots (web bots or spiders) wander all over everything in cyberspace and send the data back to the data collectors. This is good and bad. Good if you a researching something very esoteric and want to learn, bad if you are serious about privacy.
The main site of OCF with the several hundred pages of content on oral cancer is very heavily trafficked. There are between 20-40,000 users on it at any given moment during USA daylight hours. In order for the site to run as fast as it does, it also has to have its own unique servers or pages would take forever to load with that much bandwidth being used by readers and search engines. It has the Google search engine that I described above.
The event part of the site that runs the calendar is on different servers as well. This is because we let other people's computers post to it, so it is the least protected of the servers. It still runs constant malware software, and tracks every isp that enters on to it to put up an event so that we can block them if there are tracked problems to them, but it is not secure enough for us to put it on the servers that run everything else.
And there is the OCF news section, which has an archive of oral cancer news articles going back to 2001 or so, that has a huge amount of data on it. Again because of the data load and the traffic there (it runs an RSS feed to anyone in the world that wants it, and there are tens of thousands of subscribers that it serves worldwide) it would slow everything down elsewhere if it was coupled up to the main site. I highly recommend that people here subscribe to it, because we put a lot of effort into locating in science journals and in general media everything we think is of value to people interested in oral cancers. More, it is FREE, and the information that is there is vetted by our docs before it is put up to be sure that it not promoting junk science or worse outright fraud.
But to someone wandering around OCF's web presence, it seems seamless and all in the same location, but it is not. We have our webmaster Chester who is a code warrior and had the insight to set this up properly as we grew (often to complaints from me about how much all this hardware and infrastructure was costing). Chester works for OCF for pennies on the dollar to what he makes elsewhere, and we are very lucky to have the time he puts in for us over the last decade. But back in the day, I would have never gotten off on the right foot if he had not guided the foundation to put in the proper protections, and consider the future bandwidth/traffic demands that we would eventually be carrying.
So there is a small look behind the curtain. If anyone wants to know more about our security, why we do the things we do, how we spend your donations or whatever, you just have to ask. I take very seriously the transparency that is required of us to be a public charity. Any donor to OCF should have full disclosure of any serious questions they have.
By the way Eric, we were going to put up those penis enhancement ads, since they pay the largest amount� but I was actually trying to protect you when I realized that you were the poster boy for the company�.
