The Details

On Saturday afternoon while waiting for a flight I decided to upgrade the discussion forum's website software using my cell phone.  Now a few years ago this would have been unthinkable, but today I can do quite a bit from my cell phone -- even some development. 

Unfortunately, during the upgrade my firewall halted the upgrade because it did not recognize my IP Address -- a great security measure, which requires me to whitelist the IP address I'm currently using. The problem is my cell phone, for some reason, would not properly display the screen which would allow me to whitelist the ip address I was currently using, so the upgrade could not be completed until I got back home and get technical support from the vendor.

Sometimes I feel like the effort to keep this forum running is really not worth it... most people really do prefer the big corporate social media sites.  I see successful forums like Lipstick Alley doing well so it gives me hope.    

I truly apologize apologize for the inconvenience due to the two week outage caused by the tremendous increase in traffic.

Peace,

Troy

Never get it twisted. y'all are my peeps and I have Nothing but love for ya'll!

The first change is that I've set up AALBC.com to use a CDN, which is basically a set of globally distributed servers to help spend up the website.  During this transition there may have been some anomalous behavior on the website at least one user has reported that a problem they previously observed has gone away.

The site was also hacked.  Anytime you use third party software (like this discussion forum), or wordpress (used for my Blog), hackers will figure out ways to compromise the website.  This discussion forum was hacked.  The motivation seems to be just pure malice...  At any rate I'm changing password and deleted old accounts.  My web host deleted a ton a stuff it is possible a bug or two was introduced, but this I'm looking into.  The only problem is that I have not observed any problems so I relying on you all to describe to me was is happened.

I honestly believe, and I know this will sound like a conspiracy theory, that big corporations are behind all the spam email we get and all the hackers indie sites have to content with.  Why would they be behind this you might ask?

Well if email becomes so riddled with spam it becomes more of a pain to use and people will use instant messenger, whats app (both Facebook products)or twitter to send messages to each other.   If websites become to difficult to maintain people will use Facebook as their main platform instead of an indie website.  

Obviously, indie discussion forums are a prime target, because it drives people to social media -- I've already had to abandon one discussion forum, thumperscorner (which I just now discovered is down), due to hackers and Google banning me from delivering advertisements.  It is a real battle.

As a result, I'm changing the look of these discussion forums to match AALBC new look. The discussion forums is third party code, so I what I can change and how I make those changes is a mission of discovery and somewhat of a challenge right now.  Please bear with me as I experiment with settings and try to get this done as quickly as I can.

Thanks,

Troy

Let me know if you see any other problems.  While the site has been up for several hours, I only gained access a few minutes ago (information relating to the new location of AALBC.com does not reach all corners of the world wide web at the same time), and I have quite a few things to check out before I call it a day.

I tell you dealing hackers, trolls, and corporate domination of the web.  Running an indie website can be a real drag sometimes...

I was outgrowing my current web host a needed to move anyway, this might be a good time to do it.  Keep me in your prayers.

So far everything looks pretty good, but as with any changes things can get wonky.

Sort of like sleeper accounts, laying in the cut waiting to pounce.

It seems my Blog was bombarded by attempts to log into my admin account.  The this barrage of attempts caused to to exceed the allocation of resources allocated to me by my web host.  Which essentially brought down anything that uses a database, my Blog, large sections of the site and of course this discussion forum.

It really never ends.  A bunch of IP address were blocked and I installed a plugin on my wordpress blog called wordfence.  Basically it will block any IP address that attempts multiple failed login's.  This should prevent this problem from reoccurring.  If you use the Wordpress CMS I encourage you to install Wordfence too.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

There are of course residual problems like broken avatars from Facebook.  If you notice anything else please email me or post the problem on one of the forums. Thanks

Right now I have to figure out why my books ads are not displaying...

For the last couple of months I'v been maintaining two versions of this website AALBC.com and AALBC.org.  This is starting to become problematic for me.  In a world where I have all the resources I needed to do the website upgrade properly, I would be able manage both sites make the switch to the new version of AALBC.com virtually seemless, sort of like flipping a switch.

Alas, this poor webmaster does not have that luxury, so I've decided to simply point everything to the new version of AALBC.com.  This means for several months the website will display pages with old versions and new versions of the website.  Sure this will not be the best experience for visitors, but it will be A LOT easier for me to manage.  It will also be much better for SEO, as AALBC.org is showing up in search results and thereby weakinging AALBC.com.

That is probably a bit more detail than most of you needed, or desired, but I know there will be small percentage of people who might find my reasoning of interest so I figure I'd share it.

The discussion forum is really a standalnoe website, it does not share the same database as AALBC.com proper but since I did not build the database migrating it is a bit tricky, since I don;t know everything that needs to be done to make it work properly--there are just a lot of moving parts.

Hopefully, there will not be to many problems.

A troll has made it his (mostly likely a young white guy, if I were to profile), mission to trash our forum here with extremely vulgar, obscene and racist photos.

This particular troll is pretty aggressive and determined.  They have spammed the board on more than one occasion.  In the most recent case, they created multiple accounts then spammed the board in what I will call a cluster attack. This resulted in hundreds of vulgar images appearing across multiple conversations simultaneously.

Some of the accounts were active, but lying dormant, long before the attack before this attack.  One account belong to the aptly named "Unkle Ruckus" had to be banned because he shared the vulgar message in an unrelated conversation.

The spammers also waited until I was likely asleep before launching their attack, so the posts were on the forum for 7 hours before I removed them. 

Spamming trolls have always been a problem on this board, I guess it is the nature of the beast for forums where Black people are trying to do something positive.   

The software this discussion forum uses monitors email and ip addresses for known spammers, so much of this crap is prevented right off the bat, but a sufficiently determined spammer can get around these measures and unfortunately cause great damage including bringing the board down.

Fortunately, the software for this forum makes it trivial to remove these images and prevent the same accounts from causing further damage.  So while this episode is over, it will definitely be repeated.  I work to make sure these efforts are thwarted before you even become aware of it. 

One poster who warned me alerted me about the spam (a good thing) wrote;

"Someone has posted vulgar images as a reply in this thread. I urge you to delete the thread as it not good for the reputation of my business. Please do it as soon as possible."

The person had only made one post on the forum and they did actually removed it.  This is fine and I understand, but this comment really irked me: Does this person think that these maliciously racist and vulgar images do not hurt MY BUSINESS? Do they think that I would not remove the images as soon as possible? Sheesh! The lack of empathy and self-centeredness of some people know no bounds. 

One of my websites, the previous home of this discussion forum, thumperscorners.com, was banned from carrying Google ads because of similar types of images that I was simply was unable to easily find and remove. My inability to easily remove spam was one of the main reasons I had to abandon the platform.

I took the time to explain this to help posters and people who read these forums without posting (affectionately known as "lurkers") that I appreciate you coming here and I hope these episodes to not discourage you from continuing to visit the website.  I'm doing my best to prevent and remove this type of garbage from defacing what we are doing here.

Peace,
Troy

The problem I was correcting was on the database side and transparent to visitors, the database problem has been corrected but the user interface (the stuff you see) has a few bugs.  There is a lot of behind the scenes activity required to keep this beast of a website running.

I have not had time to follow up with the software developer's technical support but will I do so as soon as possible.

I apologize to the inconvenience. 

I suspect I may have compromised the forum by installing a rogue script (obtained from the vendors support forum) to correct a relatively minor problem with the emoticons  not working properly.

There were hundred of extra files. in fact so many more that they exceeding the site of the entire website to the point my websites billed me at a rate of 7 times my normal monthly charge which was my first clue something was wrong.  I got that charge before the forum crashed.  When I finally looked I saw the hackers were pretty clever masking their scripts belonging to the program.  I could not sort out which files belonged and which ones did not, so I deleted everything.

At any rate, everything seems to be working fine not, but I had to delete everything, change passwords and reinstall the software.  

Now back to some real work...

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