Forums offline temporarily [Update: Now open again!]
My hosting company has detected the large amounts of spam being posted on the forum and have gone in and moved the forum files away, effectively taking it offline. I’m not immediately sure what the best way is to remedy this, but I’ll consider all the options and hopefully have it back up and running soon.
However, as everyone probably already knows, I’m not very active around here anymore due to lack of time, so unfortunately I have no way of telling you how long it’s going to take.
I also want to ask you whether you would be OK with me installing a new forum, or if you prefer I try to salvage what’s left of the old one? A new database would mean new user registrations, but also a whole lot of better, more stable features (and no spam), whereas merely upgrading the old one would likely preserve all the spam posted so far and might not stay effective in combating future attacks.
Update: I figured the forum was pretty much broken beyond repair in the state it was in (again, I’m sorry about this), so I felt it necessary to take some drastic measures. Every user with an ID over 1000 has been deleted, along with all their posts. I realize there’s a chance there were some legitimate users among them, and I’m very sorry about removing you, but there was little else to do. Thankfully, this restored the forums to a very usable state, with 99% of the spam deleted along with the bot accounts that posted them.
I have also migrated the forums over to PHPBB, meaning it’s now faster, better and much more secure than it was before. There’s now not only an activation requirement on new members, but also captcha verification and restrictions on new members. Some of this may be a bit draconian at first, but as we go along, I’ll be loosening it up to make the forums more comfortable for everyone.
All the old users should be migrated over to the new forums, but if you’re having troubles logging in, first try to reset your passwords by following the instructions on the login page. If that doesn’t work, feel free to contact me to let me know, and I’ll look into it. The conversion from the old forums to the new ones isn’t perfect, but so far I haven’t noticed any immediate issues myself.
So, without further ado, I once again welcome you to the Quiet Storm forums!