A revolt? The old board is dead - long live the old board?
Is this designed to be a replacement to the old site or a temporary location until the old site is unhacked? If the former, hopefully this server is more immune to intrusions.
Having a place to post local WNY MINI-related activities is beneficial to this community, as laid back as it seems to be. There are occasional flickers of life though, e.g. Cathleen's Finger Lakes Run a while back. The trick seems to be able to establish and maintain good communication. The question is how to get that communication going.
It's definatally not a revolt, but a stop-gap measure untill we get a new board up and running. Diane sent me this: The site has been discontinued. I am putting the word out that anyone who wants to start up the website for the club is welcome to it...spread the word that if anyone is interested in taking care of the website they have my blessings. Thanks, Diane
when I e-mailed her to let her know that the old board was hacked again... So it's up to us to pick up the pieces and carry on. I still had an account with Sparklit, which has a free version of their message board (advert at the top, some features are cut). Luckly, I found a copy of the old board's logo (thanks to Peace's website) to place on here.
So really, it's a "where do we go from here" type of situation. I've already posted one rambling about the subject on my blog (the link back to the blog is above), I'm willing to help out and run a site, but I just cannot afford to pay for it myself. I can donate time and knowledge, but not the cash.
Re: Security.. the issue was with the software that the old site was ran on, phpBBS. There are a few glaring holes in it's security, which allowed Yusef to hack hundreds, if not thousands of phpBBS's with a script (or he just has WAY too much time on his hands). It's so bad that the main support board for phpBBS was hacked and inoperable for a while. The funny thing about the hack, is besides it's rather un-glamorous, the acutal website is still intact. For example, if you use a browser like Opera, which allows you to easily change the way websites are displayed, you can change the black graphics to black text on a while background, and look, the site is still there. Not very usable, but it just shows what an lame hack-job it was (it really only affected the formatting of the website), and how exposed that phpBBS is. So I wouldn't really worry about the security of the message board, as long as the found holes are pached up as soon as the patches are released. Just like you should do with your home PC (as Yusef himself said in a e-mail that I found on google, is that his hack did not work on the most current version of phpBBS). So again, I wouldn't worry beyond your standard set of best pratices.
That being said, this is just our temporary lodging, our home away from home, untill we can build a new clubhouse. It's like the clubhouse in the garage when it's too snowy to use the treehouse.
