i was in CT for the weekend so i had that to distract me. i missed the forumns being up though when i was online
Sorry about the errors today! You may have seen weird "Redirect Loop" errors, or have clicked a thread and it takes you somewhere completely different. Once this major bug is fixed up I can restore the rest of the features of the forum gradually. FWIW, this has caused a 72 hour headache and if anyone's a supreme wizard with PHP/MySQL/Vbulletin/VB SEO/wget or Regular Expressions I'd love for your help. Please email/MSN/AIM me. Heh, they occupy me on my phone when I have to kill a few minutes, too.
What the hell would we do without tweak? it has become a part of our lives!! Such a great bunch of people in this little community.
yea no shit.. i still ponder the day if and when this place will be no more.. just think about.. yes.. let the depression set in.. yes.. think about it.. think about it.. hurts inside doesnt it??
Well, the thing for me is that there are other forums out there (like Anandtech) but: 1) They're big. 2) They're sensitive pussies. You'll post something and before there's any time for discussion the thread gets buried under 50 new ones. And heaven forbid you should utter an obscenity, or Photoshop PedoBear into someone's pictures of their grandchildren. Pussies...
QFT!!!! This forum is by far the best on the web... It will be a sad day when this forum goes bye-bye.... ~Will Courtier~
Does this mean we're small insensitive weenies? HAHAHAHAHAHaHaHaHahahahah.......HA!!!!!!! The only other forum I visit even semi-regularly is AnimeSuki, and I can't imagine you folks hanging out in the fansubbed and claymore sections I frequent! :unibrow: We'd probably all get banned!
I have no plans to shut it down. Some of these replies would indicate that is the case. Really I'm trying to fix it as fast as I can. The biggest problem is that the site is 11 years old now and since it's live, I am trying to add some of the features back into a site "on the move", which makes errors and problems persistent. I suppose I could shut it down for a whole day or so and add all the required upgrades, but it's been down so much that I'm trying anything I can to prevent that.
I think we'd all be ok with you shutting down T3D if it means taking the time to develop it in-depth to make your life easier in the future as well as letting it grow! Plus we can all hang on IRC
Search engine friendly URLs should be okay now! This was my biggest concern, since the time it was down could've severely impacted Google traffic (making every thread a 404). Please let me know if you have any errors with threads not loading, seeing avatars when clicking threads, etc. I seriously screwed with that thing for days and finally found a rogue database entry that wasn't being overwritten. The forums may not look much better than they did yesterday, but this was the biggest hurdle in fixing the site. It's all downhill from here.
So did we find out why this happened? Can we do something to prevent this from the future? Was it really a hacker?
It probably wasn't an individual hacker, but more likely a script that uses search engines to find out of date software and install exploits. I had installed our old CMS (Joomla) years ago, but actually updated it early last week because our OS/PHP version were updated and it wasn't compatible anymore. Apparently the brand new one also had an exploit, which was used to install a malicious script which allowed backdoor access to the server. This was then used to 'infect' the server, installing malicious scripts all over the place and mass-emailing people, etc. It was such a mess we had to delete everything and start over. Yes it can be prevented. We no longer have that Joomla installation on there (instead it will be using static content). Additionally, Vbulletin will have to remain 100% up to date at all times now. It sucks the site was down for a few days and I didn't -want- to do all this work, but it was overdue for a big spring cleaning anyway. Thankfully we keep regular backups so it was just a matter of time getting it all back up.
the only thing I noticed is that most of the threads are marked as new for me even though I have read them already. and don't joke about this forum not being here. I've been here over 10 years and it's just part of my daily routine and helps me get through the day. No other forum compares to it at all.
I changed the way Vbulletin marks threads as read just today which may have caused some temporary issues. Click "Quick Links" at the top, then "Mark Forums Read". If this doesn't fix the problem in the next ~24 hours I can revert my changes. This method is supposed to work better now.
If anyone else is having these problems, I suggest clearing temp/cache and cookies, re-logging in... let me know if the problem persists. I'm trying to iron out all the bugs. Thanks guys.
it wasn't a huge deal. I just marked all as read and started fresh and it seems to be good now. thanks dan.
