4th Anniversary message

Total Raised: £508.90

Posted: Fri Jun 12, 2009 12:23 pm PhpBB3: anti spam portal

Hopefully this will be installed by the end of the day.

Options will be:

Ban common spam ips: Default YES
Ban rogue email domains: Default YES

This will also migrate to phpbb2 and is part of a general upgrade to anti-spam measures.

Posted: Thu Jun 11, 2009 10:45 am Will you be getting a warning email?

New code is now installed to monitor your control panels password strength.

From some point in the next week forums with weak passwords will start getting monthly warnings to change a weak password.

Posted: Tue Jun 02, 2009 9:50 pm Zaphod just rebooted

Will say more later.

Posted: Mon Jun 01, 2009 10:40 am phpbb3.05 Released

This will be installed over the next week:

Posted: Sat May 30, 2009 10:37 am New management system installed

This should be entirely invisible to the user, but does create some ripples at the forum level.

In particular the advertising on forums is flagged differently, and all forums will slowly get updated with the new flags.

The benefit of the new system is that we should be able to flag important issues for forum owners directly in their forums.

Posted: Fri May 29, 2009 12:14 pm Ford Server: Performance test

With a few changes in the way the server is being operated now in place, it is time to revisit some other configuration changes.

In the past these changes whilst improving performance a little, also proved unstable and had a badly adverse effect on backup speed.

I don't hold out too much hope, but it has to be tried.

Posted: Thu May 28, 2009 6:53 pm phpbb2: IMPORTANT spambot issue and resolutions

For the last 24 hours we have had a sustained attack from over 400 addresses.

This attack was largely from Eastern Europe, but there were suspicious ips from the world over.

Whilst we have banned the IPs the attack did not really stop until we implemented a couple of board admin changes backed up by a code change.

The board change was to remove (very important) the visual confirm on registration and go over to admin activation.

This combined with a code change to prevent the hackers ever seeing the CAPTCHA image on an attempted registration seems to have halted the attack.

I have now added flood protection to the user registration visual confirm system that should further hamper hacking efforts.

What I surmise is that there is an attempt to train a spambot system to beat our so far uncracked CAPTCHA system in order to flood forums with spam.

You can tell if your forum is being attached by looking a "whos online", if there are 100's of guests in "view profile" then please temporarily remove visual confirm, and switch to admin activation.

The new system will dramatically cramp the hackers style, but best to stop them all together.

Please also report it here. Attack logs are being kept as part of the anti-flood system.

I hope the flood system will not activate unless there is really cause.

Posted: Thu May 28, 2009 11:07 am 4th Anniversary message

It is now 4 years since myff launched.

To recap a little history, a little over four years ago, the parent company MarsJupiter LTD was providing a healthy income, but none of the new projects were getting anywhere fast

I had just taken rather a long sabbatical you might say, dedicating almost all my time and effort to the not for profit community site downsizer.net, all very worthy and something I am incredibly proud to have thought up and been a part of

but all the same not something that could ever pay any bills as it is strictly volunteer work.

Now part of downsizer is a forum, and people on forums have this nasty habit of wanting their own forums

One member was having trouble with a free forum causing me to look at her forum and from there the general free forums market, clearly not only did lots of people want lots of forums, but what they almost always (if not always always) got was rotten to the core.

I could not envisage coding and running anything that would not easily be better than what people were getting. Even if we ended up "bad" we would still be "better".

So about one or two weeks later I had a system coded, and a server rented.

The system was phpbb2 with an in house management system, not some "off the shelf" free forums system. Those systems are part of why free systems are generally so bad.

There was no template editing in those days, if you wanted a logo you provided it and I create template for people manually

That of course was rather good for users in some ways, but also plainly unsustainable.

There was a reason for doing that way though, because whilst you could find "hacks" to let people replace phpbb logos, such hack were inherently limited, from the start I wanted a system that would offer people a whole lot more.

6 months of so later, we gave people full template editing

6 months after that the first tentative "portals" appeared.

Key to a lot of this were the moderators providing their time freely to help members and give feedback on the system, as well as their efforts (Symon in particular) with writing guides, guides that frequently needed updating when features were tweaked. Without the moderators we would not have done anywhere near as well

Key also was the fact that money could be thrown into servers to keep everything running reasonable well. Most free forums systems die in the face of popularity as advertising revenues on forums are really quite woeful. You need a deep pocket and a long term commitment to survive.

So where are we now?

Firstly and most importantly for all our sakes, is that we are running a service that is in the black, it may ease our way forward if people put money into the server appeal, but we are not about to collapse if they don't.

Secondly, we are still developing the system. People waiting for one thing or another (and there is always a list) should take heart in reading the announcements, there is a steady flow of new features and that will continue.

Of special interest at the moment is the "CATALOG" portal that allows things like recipe databases to be easily added to forums. I'm hoping to make this live in a few weeks, please be patient on that one, it is running on downsizer.net currently and it is best to get it fully tested before adding it everywhere.

There are still features like "delete posts, when a user is deleted" that will be added to the phpbb2 system, and work is occurring to get phpbb3 up to speed with extra features. That work though has a little hold on it currently as the next official phpbb3 release is due and there is little point in having to sets of changes to integrate at once.

Anyhow, last but not least my thanks to our members for using the service and being patient when the occasional hiccup occurs.

Posted: Mon May 25, 2009 10:24 am Does anyone fnacy designing some icons?

Icons need to be 24x24 png files with a transparent background.

We need:

phpbb2 - as main forum
phpbb3 - as main forum
phpbb2 - created but not the main forum
phpbb3 - created but not the main forum

purged - database purged from the system
purgatory - database placed in temporary purgatory due to inactivity
missing - oh flip where's that database gone? (not one I want ever to see).

weak password - the system will start warning people with dumb passwords

Posted: Thu May 21, 2009 10:50 am spambot attack

I have spotted and eliminated a forum that had accumulated over 200,000 spam postings

This was I think automated and the sort of thing that was probably coming in bursts and probably contributing to some of the problems we have been seeing on the Slarti server recently

Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 8:31 am General overhaul of the backup system.

More to the point I am hoping to see some speed improvements and an end to the problems caused by backups.

I have come to the conclusion that the real bottleneck on speed is our RAID5 disk systems, they work well most the time as most operations are reads from the disks and RAID5 is fast on reads, but when the backups get written initially to the RAID5 disk before transfer then the slow write speed cripples us, swamping the disk so people struggle to get to the forums

The solution I am working on is a minor evolution to the current system that pipes the backups directly to ftp. This has tested out okay on Ford and will go live for the database backup tonight, and assuming that is ok the system will be applied across the board.

Posted: Sun May 17, 2009 5:32 pm Speed improvements on Ford server

Following problems with the backup slowing the server today (the main backup has only just completed) I have taken some steps to speed up this server altering the backup processes and optimising the myff gallery that uses the Ford server.

Hopefully this will keep further issue in check.

Posted: Fri May 08, 2009 3:09 pm Advertising change

As of now (though it will take weeks to permeate through the system) forums that are totally inactive. e.g. ones that no member, mod or admin has logged into into for more than 90 days will have more advertising displayed on it.

This seems to me to be a harmless way of trying to boost income a little without effecting active forum members.

Posted: Sun May 03, 2009 6:17 pm phpbb3 actions bug fix

Actions that depend on getting the current board admins were not working. That should now be resolved.

Posted: Sat May 02, 2009 6:16 pm Question for forum admins

If you do a search on backups you can find out about our current backup regime, which is an extremely good one. If the unthinkable happens and despite the fact we run quality hardware on RAID5 systems, we did need to recover forums from backup, we could certainly say we have not skimped on the protection given to forums.

Having said that, backups are very expensive

When we buy new server kit there will be an opportunity to rethink how backups are done. So I'd like to ask the question.

If the unthinkable happened and due to a systems failure your forum had to be restored along with tons of others effected by the same problem, you would obviously be unhappy, but how old would the backup we restored from have to be before you thought we were sloppy in our backup standards?

Please be honest here, you are not going to be giving us the green light to reduce the backup level to the lowest acceptable standard.

A Blog by - admin (no pm's please)

PhpBB3: anti spam portal

Will you be getting a warning email?

Zaphod just rebooted

phpbb3.05 Released

New management system installed

Ford Server: Performance test

phpbb2: IMPORTANT spambot issue and resolutions

4th Anniversary message

Does anyone fnacy designing some icons?

spambot attack

General overhaul of the backup system.

Speed improvements on Ford server

Advertising change

phpbb3 actions bug fix

Question for forum admins