Today (02/27/08) this website was hacked and a large number of files were deleted. At the present moment most of them have been restored and the site should be operating normally with the one exception that .php files will not work. This mainly affects the forums here. The forums will stay down until we've done some PHP security updates, but they will be back shortly. Thanks for your patience
In the meantime, you can use the forums at LENSPLAY.COM, another site which I run. The URL to get to those forums is:
• HTTP://LENSPLAY.COM/SMF/INDEX.PHP
There are existing forums for lens questions and I've just added one for the Canon EOS system where you can post questions about Canon EOS bodies and Speedlites. There's not a lot of forum traffic, but if users here move there then there might be more! You'll have to register if you want to post, but the process is pretty painless and the forums are significantly more secure than the ones here are here.
There are existing forums for lens questions and I've just added one for the Canon EOS system where you can post questions about Canon EOS bodies and Speedlites. There's not a lot of forum traffic, but if users here move there then there might be more! You'll have to register if you want to post, but the process is pretty painless and the forums are significantly more secure than the ones here are.
Here's the earlier hacking report:
02/24/08 - If you read the Photo Forums here you may have noticed that they have been hacked several times in the last few days, making them inaccessible. I'm sorry about this, but right now it's beyond my control. The downside of allowing people to write to the forums is that it leaves them open to attack. Allowing write permission is always risky.
While it's possible to design secure systems, the forum software I'm using wasn't written by me and is currently no longer supported, so tracking down all the possible places where someone could get in probably isn't possible, and since I didn't write the code it's not worth my time attempting to figure out in detail how it all works. I have gone in and closed some obvious places where a hacker could get in, but hackers are probably smarter than I am, so I doubt the forums are secure and I expect they may go down again due to hacker interference.
If the forums go offline, I'll bring them back ASAP. They are backed up daily and I have periodic backups saved locally on CD, so they can be restored. It just takes a little lime to reload the files.
If it keeps on happening I may switch to new forum software, though that could mean that old posts will no longer be accessible from the new forum. However I could make them available in a "read only" archive.
If any reader of this website is an expert on Navboard 2.6.0, please contact me! I'm pretty sure there won't be anyone, but it never hurts to ask. If there are any "white hat" hacker readers, they'd be welcome to contact me too. See the About page for contact info.
Again, sorry for any forum outages. Hackers are one of the things you just have to deal with on the web. Like death and taxes, they are unavoidable, and they are just about equally welcome.
Bob