Salmoneus

Hey all, As you may have noticed, Sal's went offline last month. Our server crashed after years of being unmaintained () and we had some data corruption. Unfortunately, backups of the server and data broke at some point... which would have made the process so much easier! I was eventually able to recover the community data, but needed to rebuild the server, essentially from scratch. Apparently a lot changes in 6 years for web servers, so a lot of banging-head-against-keyboard ensued until I was finally able to get things into a good state. And... here we are! Apologies for the delay in getting things back up and running. Let me know if you have any questions! Cheers, Sal

Hey MilliganTim, welcome!!

Darn it, I forgot to add Egghe's IP to the server ban list! I mean... Welcome back Egghe!!

This work is now complete! The main website and forum are both running on a shiny, brand-new server! Things appear to be working just fine, but let me know if you notice anything amiss. It's a bit of a bittersweet moment though -- after a decade of serving our community, the old server will be decommissioned once I'm sure the new setup is working properly. Hopefully it will be turned into new servers or shiny new iPhones or something! Cheers!

Hopefully it's not the smell of burnt electronics! You're welcome! I haven't forgotten this place! ?

Hey there everyone! Believe it or not, the site and forum have been living on the same sever for more than a decade! In computer years, that's like 100 million and 3 years, give or take a year or 2 million. Basically, the forum is being served by a Stegosaurus, or something like that. It also turns out that a comet is about to destroy the very part of the datacenter housing our server, so there's that tiny detail too. Anyways, the server is really, really old, and it's living in a really old building that's about to be demolished pretty soon. Seriously, this is all true, I promise! So, I've spent a lot of time building a new server environment elsewhere which should be easier to maintain and upgrade, and it should cost a lot less to run! It also seems to run a bit faster/smoother, and we'll have the benefit of running on all the latest and greatest server software! I'm planning on running the final part of the migration on Wednesday, 9/26, which is basically the part where the forum database is moved over to the new server. My plan is to take the board offline on Wednesday night, copy over the database, run the final maintenance steps, and then update the DNS to point to the new server. For you, this update should be completely painless, except for the fact that the forum will be offline for awhile (oh noes?). I'll update this topic when the work is complete! If you have questions, or just want to post pictures of your favorite dinosaurs to celebrate the life (and impending shutdown) of the old server, please do so in this topic! Cheers, Sal

I'm not aware of any outages or downtime. Were you unable to connect to the site at all? Were you getting an error message? Thanks!

Heh! Rather than accidentally banning him, we'll do it on purpose. We can totally do that, especially for a troublemaker as heinous as Egghe!

I'm currently working on migrating the site and forum to a more modern setup, and I may end up leaving out some of these security layers altogether. It's becoming difficult to manage, and as you've experienced, it's causing issues for regular users too. So this problem may completely go away very soon!

Can you try now? Also, stop trying to BREAK things, Egghe!!

I guess the news bot just really wants us all to know about Double Dragon Chests... whatever those are.

If you want I could ban your IP altogether!

I didn't do it... Possibly fixed it. Are you guys still having trouble posting?

It's really hard to quantify, but IIRC traffic didn't really increase, even when we were were at the height of posting on social media. We do have quite a few followers on Twitter and Facebook, and maybe we could bring some folks back if we started posting interesting stuff through those channels? The problem is that the CMS that we use wasn't meant to be used as a wiki, which sounds similar to what you guys are suggesting. I'm sure that it is possible to do without changing to a new system, but it would be a large undertaking. My concern and number 1 priority is to make it safe to update content without opening our site up to vulnerabilities like cross site scripting, malicious links and SPAM. I'll reply to a few of your points... Like I mentioned above, this gets tricky, because our CMS isn't really designed to be a wiki with front-end editing capabilities. It can certainly be done, but it would need to be done in such a way that it's not going to open a security hole in our site. Right now we can give specific permissions to specific users to edit content which isn't a problem, but to do it on a mass scale would be more complicated. I would definitely like to see a refresh on the site design to bring us back to the look that we had years ago. I'm fond of the current design, but the old "retro" design was our signature. It was simple and clean, and despite its basic look, people loved it. Indeed, there are tons of things we can do. The unfortunate thing is that back when we redesigned the site, I did put a lot of effort in to make the site SEO friendly. But it backfired, for whatever reason and our ranking tanked immediately after the design went live. Attempts were made to bring us back, from building quality backlinks, to optimizing markup, posting new and updated content frequently, improving the load time of the site. And really, the old site was an SEO nightmare, but it fared really well. But nothing I did really made any impact whatsoever. But there are other things we could try. We need a mobile design for the site. Page speed can be optimized with newer tech. SSL can be put in place. Maybe these things can help some. Definitely! I think these are both cool ideas. Video guides and other content are something we discussed years ago but it never took off. I'd love to see something like this on our site.

*With sad eyes* You shouldn't fight in here. This is a magical place. Yes, we need a new skin or two. Folks should look at this topic and help us choose! Otherwise I'm going to upload random skins based on my cat's reactions (and while she's a classy cat, she has no innate sense of web design so it will most likely end badly).

Hey all, thanks for posting issues so far! I posted an announcement (Should appear at the top of every page), but it gets shortened. I wonder if this can be tweaked... You don't see a Reply to This Topic button at the top-right of that topic? :( Noted! our custom BBcodes may have been wiped out, I'll need to take a look. Oh no, this beast is staying online. I felt so bad for not getting it back online last night, but I wanted to be awake to keep an eye on things. And yeah, the emoticons box doesn't have pagination, and just shows the first 21. Might want to categorize them, or something. Group badges are fixed! All old (pre-upgrade) forum and blog content needs to be rebuilt. This includes posts, signatures, blog entries... basically anything that uses BBcode. The task t oregenerate everything is running, but it's taking an absolute eternity. You can manually go in and re-save signatures and stuff and it *should* just work. But the Friendly Forum BBcode Robot will be coming by soon to clean things up! I'm looking into this. It's a super pain and has happened to me too. I had previously switched IP address validation off, and I think that prevented this from happening. But I'm not seeing that option any more. Definitely. We can certainly add some themes! I created RuneScape Blue and RuneScape Dark (I think that's what it was called) ages ago for IPB 2.1, but I never updated it when we upgraded forum version. I think I still have the images and styles somewhere! Omgyesplz!

Hi everyone, Early yesterday morning I was alerted of a suspicious change to one of our forum software files. I immediately investigated and took the forum offline when I realized that something was amiss. Without delving into too many technical details, an unpatched vulnerability in IPB allowed an attacker to inject a malicious piece of JavaScript code into a specific skin's markup. This code would only be output and executed in a users browser under a specific set of circumstances: the user had to be visiting the forum for the first time from a search engine using a major browser. Users who didn't meet all of these criteria did not get the malicious script. From my investigation it looks like this attack was automated, and its sole purpose was to redirect users to spam/malware domains while flying under the radar from staff and forum members. I've seen no evidence of any further compromise, but of course this is not a 100% certainty. This may be a good time to change your Sal's password, and make sure it is unique from passwords for other sites. I spent most of Saturday upgrading the forum and blogs to the latest Invision Community version, which also involved upgrading the webserver and other backend software. This was an unplanned upgrade, and while I've lightly tested things, you may encounter features that are broken. If you do, please let me know by posting in this thread! Right now there are background tasks running to rebuild post content, stats, search indexes, blog entries and more. Until those complete, old posts (and other content) may be formatted incorrectly, and search results may be incomplete. I deeply apologize for this situation -- software patches are critical and need to be applied right away. I will make it a point to make sure future patches are applied ASAP.

Sorry about that, we've been having some network/connectivity related issues over the last couple of days which I'm trying to get to the bottom of. Are things working normally now?

Could you use DownThemAll to grab them from your album page?

I like it!

Hi KB! It's been a really long time! Your post made me smile - I'm so happy that being part of our community helped you through some rough times! The IRC days were pretty awesome... sometimes I wish we could bring them back. BTW Dani, that Hotel California cover is pretty sweet!

I don't get it, Dani.

pwnt like that "salmoneus" guy at every community outing since 2005. :rofl: