Well…. CPShared has really taken off in the past two weeks. It’s a surprise to see how many new people have appeared, and really satisfying to see the great and interesting content that’s coming forward. People have been making the very obvious comparison to CPUG, but I think it has become clear that there is a very different tone and style of conversation developing here, which really was the goal of having an alternative place to discuss Check Point stuff.

I hope to keep on encouraging that – while some elements of the setup of this site were related to the way that CPUG was going, the ultimate goal was really to create something that could complement the best parts of what Barry has achieved there, and ultimately provide more resources and avenues for communication to the Check Point community at large. My wildly optimistic view is that we’ve already gone a long way to achieving that.

What’s also good to report is that Barry has changed his stance on CPShared. I won’t go too far into the personal details, but the slightly disappointing stance on censorship taken by Barry at CPUG has now been lifted, and now we can start a useful cross-pollenation of information between the two sites. To date, Barry has not re-instated the censored posts, but at least moving forward this should not be an issue.

More new things that have been done :

  • Post count is already hitting 1500 posts! Membership is also growing strongly, even with our destruction without prejudice of spammers. Something I really like is that our percentage of contributor to lurker is also very good. So people are coming here and wanting to contribute. I like that!
  • The site now has an SSL certificate, so that https: access is working. This adds a layer of protection to the forum against nasty tools like FireSheep. So far, SSL is optional, so if you don’t want to use it, there’s no requirement.
  • ForumRunner support is being added for mobile clients. The big thing about this is that it also supported SSL (unlike Tapatalk at this stage) but their SSL support is experimental.
  • The Senior membership came together and created an Acceptable Use Policy for the forum. This is a slightly legalistic but important step to ensure that we’re clear on how to deal with controversy on the forum. While I strongly hope we never need to use it, it’s a good thing to know that collectively we have both a united front on what sort of culture we want to promote, as well as the governance processes to deal with anything difficult.
  • Lots of really interesting discussion about the RSA Hack and SSL compromises of the last week. While this is a CP forum, it’s narrow minded to think that these things don’t affect us as Security Professionals.

There’s a couple of other big releases that we have in store, but I’m not quite ready to talk about these yet. Keep watching and posting, and as always if there’s something you’d like to see, let us all know.