Arboristsite.com down/spammed?

webbie said:

Yes - all paid sponsors!

Thanks for the kudos although you can't keep everyone happy! It's amazing. Some people think we are over the top.....yet Arborsite, from what I hear, is 4X as bad and some are 10X as bad. We keep it tamped down somewhat with humor and moderation - but if we really had it like WE (the mods) wanted it, it would be tamped down even further. But the community as a whole doesn't react well to that. Who knows? Maybe we'll try it in 2014.

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Again, no complaints it's nice here.
Each place has its charms and personality.
But sports forums, now that's a whole other order of aggro ... you wanna see piss and vinegar, try politics threads on sports forums.

Not to get too far off topic, but I notice Darin blames a lot of it on the government and the media - for not jumping in and helping chase down those lawbreaking hackers.......

That's weird, IMHO. If you don't lock your doors, you have to expect stuff to be stolen. If the FBI was investigating every instance of small web site hacking, they wouldn't have much time for the big stuff...

Also, these hackers could be anywhere around the world.

Security is a big deal. IMHO, it's up largely to the software writers and then secondly and thirdly to the admins and web site owners.

But I do understand his frustration and am terribly sorry it happened.

I am (was) a member there, and quite honestly I came here once I was unable to access it anymore. I do like it here. Seems as if there's a different knowledge base here. I'll be here to stay as well as over there.

I think, as with anything else, that you're always aware of threats, but until one comes a knocking on your doorstep, you don't necessarily keep up on keeping the threats at bay.

Lessons cost money, the good ones cost a lot.

It should be back up and running soon!

really surprised AS is still down .. just scored a Stihl 090G and was needing specific info on where to find pieces that are not on ebay.

I'm hoping it's back soon as well...

Yep, he said a few days ago it would be Xenforo.

Yep, it's up and it's Xenforo. They should have done this weeks or months ago and been done with it. I think they lost a lot of "juice", but I'm sure it will build up again. Heck, as BB can affirm, I get nervous when we are down for 10 minutes!

This is probably the only thing in life where my standards are so high.......that is, with most stuff I'm not a perfectionist, but I don't like to disappoint my customers (and people who come here are, in effect, my current customers).

Thanks for the concern guys. To set the record straight. I had 5 different people working on this. I didn't do this myself. In the end I spent a little more money and hired just one more company...and luckily it did the trick. It's really easy to be the armchair consultant and tell us what to do. I admit when it comes to this stuff I am more hands than other forum owners on the backend. I want to know what is going on. I haven't been so disgusted in my life. It was very stressful. Arboristsite has 13 years of information on it. You can't take that away from it. If I was a newbie site. I might as well of closed up. I don't like disappointing anyone either. The tech's really did work a lot of hours on this. I did too. I really don't know what else I could of done. I apologize to everyone. Looks like we are up and going and haven't had a hack in the last 24hours...which is a record for the past month.
Darin

Good stuff.

Darin,

Good to hear that it's up!

Main thing, IMHO, is to lock down most of your registration. Use the various tools and add-ons to make sure only valid people register, and even after that have some checks....

Keep track of your registration stats - if they go up higher than you know they should, something is probably wrong. That is, if you are used to 10 or 15 valid members a day signing up and it shoots up to 50+, something could be askew.

Use the proper tools to ban entire countries or parts of the world if they are not truly part of the ongoing conversation. This is especially true for Russia and other well-known hangouts of major spammers.

Sorry for the unsolicited advice, but I'd hate to see something like that happen again.

Oh, another thing which makes sense is deleting user accounts which have never been active. If someone signed up "x" months ago and never posted...then why do they need an account? They can read the board anyway as a guest. I did this for many years on my old board sw, and recently started doing it on XF.

Arboristsite said:

Thanks for the concern guys. To set the record straight. I had 5 different people working on this. I didn't do this myself. In the end I spent a little more money and hired just one more company...and luckily it did the trick. It's really easy to be the armchair consultant and tell us what to do. I admit when it comes to this stuff I am more hands than other forum owners on the backend. I want to know what is going on. I haven't been so disgusted in my life. It was very stressful. Arboristsite has 13 years of information on it. You can't take that away from it. If I was a newbie site. I might as well of closed up. I don't like disappointing anyone either. The tech's really did work a lot of hours on this. I did too. I really don't know what else I could of done. I apologize to everyone. Looks like we are up and going and haven't had a hack in the last 24hours...which is a record for the past month.
Darin

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Hey Darin, way back when Candlepower forums was in a similar situation of having to deal with multiple down times. changing to new forum software means likely you will experience more down time.

what cpf did was preplan for downtimes by putting up another site with different IP. then letting everyone know if/when main site goes down. go to backup site. which anyone can post without registering. this lets everyone that's got withdraw symptoms from not being able to post.