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Well, boys & girls, this has been a fun ride.
Behind the scenes, this forum has been hammered recently by waves of hacks and every nasty thing that crawls the web taking advantage in every crevice it can find. Luckily you guys have only seen a little bit of this.
Anyway, since cleaning everything up and adding a few extra layers of security, 2 things happened:
One was that my host moved the site to a new server to be away from the "noisy neighbours" who didn't take security seriously enough and in so doing managed to migrate some of the scripts from an old backup before I had cleaned out all the hacks, which resulted in the forum being hacked again. Fortunately the second time didn't cause visible damage because of the extra security I'd enabled, but I am still stuck mopping up the mess in the back-end.
The second thing that happened was that a company that I had bought some software from that is integral to this forum decided to suddenly go out of business (and just after I'd paid a renewal too). There are presently thousands of their customers in similar situations. I have tried to remove this software, but it did not come out cleanly and now it has broken the forum's "plugin" system. Many extra bits rely on the plugin system, such as a number of anti-spam scripts, tricks and software that have been keeping this site mostly free from spam for quite some time. I am still trying to properly remove the broken bits of this old software so I can restore the plugin system. I've been working on it for about a week and many others trying to help me are also stumped. I will persist until I get it, but in the mean time, all the anti-spam stuff does not work.
Today I discovered a problem that had been preventing new registrations, so I fixed it. Within hours, I was faced with nearly 14,000 "new registrations", most of them Russian and Polish. Already some of these have begun to post spam. Our tireless moderators have already gone to work cleaning this up, but without the tools they used to have this is a lot harder and slower than it used to be. Please - a pat on the back to the moderators.
For the moment, I have simply disabled the entire user registration system, so no one new can register here any more - sorry. After I can get everything fixed up, I will turn it back on. In the mean time, please report any spam you see and we will be out with the mop & bucket as quick as we can.
Behind the scenes, this forum has been hammered recently by waves of hacks and every nasty thing that crawls the web taking advantage in every crevice it can find. Luckily you guys have only seen a little bit of this.
Anyway, since cleaning everything up and adding a few extra layers of security, 2 things happened:
One was that my host moved the site to a new server to be away from the "noisy neighbours" who didn't take security seriously enough and in so doing managed to migrate some of the scripts from an old backup before I had cleaned out all the hacks, which resulted in the forum being hacked again. Fortunately the second time didn't cause visible damage because of the extra security I'd enabled, but I am still stuck mopping up the mess in the back-end.
The second thing that happened was that a company that I had bought some software from that is integral to this forum decided to suddenly go out of business (and just after I'd paid a renewal too). There are presently thousands of their customers in similar situations. I have tried to remove this software, but it did not come out cleanly and now it has broken the forum's "plugin" system. Many extra bits rely on the plugin system, such as a number of anti-spam scripts, tricks and software that have been keeping this site mostly free from spam for quite some time. I am still trying to properly remove the broken bits of this old software so I can restore the plugin system. I've been working on it for about a week and many others trying to help me are also stumped. I will persist until I get it, but in the mean time, all the anti-spam stuff does not work.
Today I discovered a problem that had been preventing new registrations, so I fixed it. Within hours, I was faced with nearly 14,000 "new registrations", most of them Russian and Polish. Already some of these have begun to post spam. Our tireless moderators have already gone to work cleaning this up, but without the tools they used to have this is a lot harder and slower than it used to be. Please - a pat on the back to the moderators.
For the moment, I have simply disabled the entire user registration system, so no one new can register here any more - sorry. After I can get everything fixed up, I will turn it back on. In the mean time, please report any spam you see and we will be out with the mop & bucket as quick as we can.
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