Forum change

Posted On February 17, 2014

The time has finally come for new forum software. Looking back at forum posts, I first discussed this change almost exactly four years ago. Wow, this took a long time. The reason being is that I have both looked forward to and feared this day. I am mainly concerned about the password change that comes with this migration. Everyone must set a new password on the new forums. I sincerely hope that this does not reduce the number of people who use them. We have a good but small community and I can’t afford to lose any of you. Any questions and/or problems can be directed to me. I can reset your password should the automated process fail or update your email address if the one you registered with is out of date. Now for an explanation on why this was necessary…

The old forum software was not being actively maintained by its developers. It went essentially unchanged over the 9 years it was running here. This lack of maintenance became a problem as we saw the amount of spam targeting us increase. Spam user registrations. Spam posts. And, hundreds of user sessions at any given moment. This was not necessarily a denial of service attack but that sustained level of use was too much for the server platform we can afford. As a result, we have seen many outages over the last six months. Internet attacks are ever more sophisticated and, with unsupported software, comes the inability to respond to the latest attacks.

While the new system is better I suspect there will be a learning curve for me and that the spam problem may actually get worse in the short term as I learn to tweak it. The good news is that there is a great community behind the forum software. Longer term I am hoping for better site stability as the software uses less server resources.

I have taken great care in migrating the old posts into the new system. I admit that the new forums are different and might take some getting used to. While I would have loved to buy a commercial forum package lke many of the other Mustang forums, my limited budget for this site had me find something free. The biggest change for you might be the lack of a list of recent posts. In the new system, you can find a similar feature under Recent Discussions.

So, please reset your passwords and join back in the discussion.