Vive Site News News

We apologize that Vive was not available for some time this weekend; our webmaster resolved the problem as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, due to the necessary resignation of our primary webmaster, at the present moment Vive is running without much needed technical help and so we are unable to address bugs and ongoing issues such as certain registration problems at this time. As soon as we find our needed technical help (and we are currently exploring several options) we will address these issues; however for the moment we simply don't have the technical help to do so. We are therefore asking for your patience as we work on finding a solution to our technical needs. And if you are interested in volunteering some time please see the information on skills/knowledge required at left. Thanks, Susan Thompson www.vivelecanada.ca

Just a reminder that it's best to post only a short quote from any article you want to point out to the rest of Vive's readers. Reprinting entire articles without permission is a violation of copyright, and even extensive quoting may cross the line. We try to keep an eye on this as moderators and editors but please do keep this in mind while posting. Remember, anyone can post to Vive--just click "Contribute" on the top menu and fill out the form. Your original thoughts and comments are always welcome.

I am pleased to announce the creation of a new section for economic issues. It's the first new section in about 3 years. It's tough to choose an icon for such an all encompassing section; so I chose a picture of a guy, face covered in dirt, in a hard hat. After all, what is "The Economy" about if not hard work?

Is it worthwhile providing a thread for happenings in the Canadian economy?

Vive le Canada is one of the noblest concepts of a free press. Noble, because a free press is the basis of an enlightened society -- the healthy foundation upon which all else develops. Vive not only has the courage to throw open its newsroom doors to anyone with a story they think the public should know about; Vive also places its trust in the good sense of the public to comment on those stories. More about that later. With convergence ruling today's business world, big media swallows up the small independent news services, resulting in fewer options for people. So big media has grown fat, slick and powerful, using their power to get even stronger, fatter, and less caring about the common good. Vive le Canada is the direct opposite.

No, the vivelecanada server wasn't hacked. Last night, our servers were moved to a new location with better cooling, power, and security, which should lead to improved reliability overall. The server that vive normally runs on is having network issues (most likely caused by an improperly plugged-in network cable). I have brought the site back up on another server until I can get to the colocation facility to sort out the problem. We apologise for any inconvenience.

I have just converted all of our news feeds to RSS 2.0. The filenames are the same, but ending with "rss" instead of "rdf". Please update your feedreaders to reflect this!

Example:

http://www.vivelecanada.ca/backend/vivelecanada.rdf

Becomes:

http://www.vivelecanada.ca/backend/vivelecanada.rss

In addition, I have made some changes to how the vivelecanada website works, which should greatly reduce the number of errors when fetching pages. (which have been rare but increasing).

If anyone has any problems, please report them in the site support forum.

[update: made it more clear that action must be taken by users of our news feeds! -JvH]

Google warns on 'unsafe' websites Google has started warning users if they are about to visit a webpage that could harm their computer. The warning will pop up if users click on a link to a page known to host spyware or other malicious programs. The initiative comes out of a larger project cataloguing programs that plague people with unwanted ads, spy on web habits or steal personal data. Google is one of several companies trying to act as an "in-flight adviser" to ensure people stay safe online.

The Vive le Canada.ca board has noticed an increase in postings to the site that are anti-immigrant, anti-multiculturalism, and frequently racist in nature. While most of these can be attributed to a small number of repeat offenders, we would like to remind ALL Vive members, users and readers that Vive le Canada.ca most emphatically does not support any nationalism based on race or ethnicity. As site policy we advocate a progressive nationalism that both builds Canada's economic independence and strengthens policies such as immigration and multiculturalism, because we believe that a huge part of our unique Canadian culture is our country's diversity.

UPDATE: To clarify, the general rise in racialized comments is not restricted to Vive le Canada, and seems to be happening across all media in Canada. Much of the media and our own government are presenting us with "common enemies" and it needs to stop. We feel we need to show that the "common enemy" has been a tactic used to mould the public for centuries. And we aren't falling for it. So our restatement of this policy wasn't only prompted by a few comments on this site--it's also far more than that, it's a statement of our opposition to what is becoming a general drift away from civil rights and understanding across Canada.

Comments or articles that are considered unacceptable on Vive include hate speech as defined by the Canadian government, death threats to any individual or group (even if you claim it is a joke), slogans or symbols from a hate group like the KKK or the Heritage Front (even if you claim it is a joke), and racial slurs of any description.

Vive le Canada.ca asks all users, and especially site members, to abide by the following Code of Conduct (also available in our FAQ):

Commitment to Fair Treatment
Article 47 of our by-laws:
All members shall commit, without exception, to the following principles:
a.fair and democratic decision-making;
b.reasoned and productive dialogue, even in cases of conflict;
c.not to permit speech or materials that promote racism or hate against any individual or group
d.not to stereotype or discriminate against individuals or groups based on race, colour, ethnic or national origin, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, civil status, age, religion, language, handicap or the use of a means to palliate a handicap.

Although Vive offers users the ability to vote down all comments they deem racist, the editors also reserve the right to delete comments or posts and to ban users from the site, especially users who persist in posting unacceptable material after explicit warnings from Vive board, moderators, and/or editors. We will always give warning before taking any more extreme action such as a user ban, and users who are banned can also appeal the ban to the board.

Vive believes strongly in freedom of speech and in maintaining an open forum, which is why deleting comments or posts and banning members will never be our first choice in any situation. But we must also balance our commitment to free speech with the need to maintain a safe, fair forum. For the privilege of using this site and this forum we feel we have the right to ask people to be respectful and abide by some basic rules when visiting (no hate, no threats, no hacking, etc.) and these rules are also generally in line with Canadian law. Everyone is free to start their own sites of course with their own rules or lack thereof, or to visit other sites if they find these very basic rules and guidelines too restrictive.

Lastly, Vive moderators and editors are not infallible. There is a huge amount of information posted to the site each day and we may miss a comment that violates our site policy. Members, users and readers of Vive are always welcome to alert us to inappropriate comments or postings and to ask for action to be taken. Please feel free to contact us anytime if you notice a racist post that you feel should be addressed. You can write to editor@vivelecanada.ca, to the board at board@vivelecanada.ca, or simply to susan.thompson@vivelecanada.ca.

Don Martin has written a column on Harper in the May 19, 2006 issue of the National Post.

He takes to task Harper for his disdain and total disregard of Parliament even though he himself as MP under a Liberal government was quite adamant on the importance of respect for that institution: "It is the Parliament that's supposed to run the country, not just the largest party and the single leader of that party."

It is a very critical column and Harper comes across as a very angry and all in all quite unsavoury character.

Still for those of us who knew that Harper was dissembling all along, that the persona he was projecting during the campaign was fake, and that it was only a question of time before the real Harper resurfaced, that is not new. Chassez le naturel il revient au galop, goes the saying.

What struck me in Don's column was this: "No," he writes, "this isn't another tired rant about Harper holding journalists in disdain, which he does and we'd best get used to it because it's going to get worse. [...] It's an inside problem of scant outside interest." (my emphasis).

This morning, I woke up and said "it's a good day to upgrade vivelecanada". After about an hour of downtime, the site is back up and better than ever! While still not allowing anonymous posting, vive now allows users to post using their Blogger or LiveJournal accounts, without needing to create a vive-specific account. This should open up a whole new range of discussion, getting many more casual posters.

Due to continued and widespread abuse, I have disabled posting of comments by anonymous users. There were a great many warnings, but the sheer volume of off-topic, duplicate, insulting, plagiarised, or just plain incoherent posts finally hit the breaking point. I am still working on the new code for vive, which will hopefully allow me to open things up again when it goes live. But if I spend all of my time deleting duplicate or spam posts, then I have no time to work on the code. There will be complaints; I'll do my best to address them all. If you have not yet registered, it's fast, free, and secure, and you get free access to the entire site. Thank you for your understanding, I'll keep you all posted as the new code progresses. [Edit: moved this from my comment below to here. -jesse ] A nice side effect is that the server will no longer be quite so hammered, and should save me some money for bandwidth each month. It's as good a time as any to mention that your donations keep me from paying that $30/month(!!) bandwidth bill out of my own pocket, so if you support vive and would like to see it continue to improve, you might consider making a small donation. Thank you. :)

Last night, the server vive is on crashed. I'm looking into the reasons for it, but it doesn't look like anything scary. It did lead to a corrupt database table (hence the SQL error it was tossing up), which I've since repaired. No data was lost. Vive le computer glitches! :P

To answer Vivelecanada's question - "How can we promote Canadian Sovereignty?" - my suggestion would be for Vivelecanada to promote the following five phrases on a new poster. This new poster could be distributed and printed from the site to help drive home the point. A contest could be run to select some of the most artistic and effective ways to present this important message. The title of this poster would be: The 5 phrases of True Canadians - brought to you by Vivelecanada.ca 1) When is Canada not Canada? Answer: When it is Americanized! Say NO to Deep Integration with the USA!