Web site maintenance

[McCarroll21]

Sometime this weekend, either late tonight or late tomorrow night, I am going to close down the forums and update the forum software to the latest version. I am also going to follow some steps laid out by the vBulletin team to make the forums more secure on the heels of today's hack attempt.

Just let this be your heads up, even though I will probably close the forums to backup, update, etc. to the forums when no one else is around.

[McCarroll21]

It's time to shut it down. 1:20 Central Time... so that gives you about 10 minutes to finish up.

[McCarroll21]

We're back. I guess that was kind of quick ... 40 minutes?

Okay, what happened?

Yesterday we were hacked, not once, but twice. The way they did this was hacking into my account and changing the email and password to something that they could log in to (Chief changed my email back to the real one or else I wouldn't have been able to log in). From there, they went into the AdminCP, through script, and changed one of our templates ... thus why it was only the forum home that was affected by the hacker. I decided that before taking action to make the forums more secure, I needed to upgrade to the newest version of vBulletin, after all, if you're not running the newest version that puts you at risk anyway, right?

So, while updating the forums, I made my account "unalterable." That basically means that they won't be able to change anything in my profile so they can't get in through my account. I have also put in a few other things that will make the AdminCP more secure ... stuff I won't name here because it would be wide open to everyone.

Since updating the forums, I have noticed that we have lost some template changes. It shouldn't be anything major, but who knows. I think I've fixed all the templates. Also, just something to tidy up the place, I removed the donation page and link from the navbar as you can now do that from the homepage in the module linking to our store. The Game Recaps link will replace that link in a few days, and I may add a link to the navbar for our store depending on space.

Today I will update all of the modifications I have installed to try to bring the forums up to par. Anyway, if you notice something not working or anything different from how it was, let me know and I'll fix it. I still have the old forums and every directory untouched so it wouldn't be hard to see what is different.