Hi Everyone,
By now many of you are aware we were subjected to a hacking attack last weekend that has serious security issues for the site. This means I will have to upgrade our website with a newer version of the forum software to try to fix the security breaches and better protect our membership's privacy.
I plan to start this process this Saturday (21st August), shortly after 12:00am GMT.
Unfortunately, this is not a simple exercise and will take a lot of time because I need to rewrite many of the special features of this website, such as the galleries, the article library, the gold coins/ranking system, and the OR Awards competition.
I need to
shut the site down on Saturday to back it up and then convert the forums and membership to the latest version of phpBB.
This will take about a day, if everything goes right.
The forums will hopefully be back again on Sunday, but
you'll all need to change your password when you log in again.
But it will take me a while to upgrade the graphics of the forums and do all of the other things too, so we'll be using a basic version of phpBB for a while until I can get that fixed. I can work on those separately, so the forums will still be active while I'm doing that.
A few key points:
- Forums will be converted first, but will look very basic for a while,
- Your user will stay the same, but your password will need to change,
- The OR Awards will be delayed until I can rewrite the software,
- The galleries will be deleted (so save your pictures now if you want to keep them),
- The article library will be unavailable until I can rewrite it, but the articles will be saved,
- The ranks and gold coins will be saved, but won't be visible for a while,
- I can't guarantee the chatbox will come back.
One good thing to come out of this will be the improvement to the forum software itself - phpBB3 is very impressive with some cool features.
We'll keep everyone informed of our progress as best we can, and hopefully it won't take too long to get back to normal.