Forbidden Message

[barbara]

Many of you e-mailed me to ask if you had been "Forbidden" from accessing this website. We had a hacker that got into the server and there was a security hole that had gone undetected is what I am told. It's unfortunate that the message used the word forbidden without any explanation, but everything is okay now.

[Everett]

Thank goodness!!!!!
I thought that I had done something bad and being the new kid on the block had been put in the corner

[Technocracy]

Everett,

Accounts are manually reviewed and activated as part of our effort to keep as many spammers and such as possible off of the site.

Due to the manual portion of this process there is a delay between when you register and account and when the account is validated for use and you are unable to post on the forums during this validation time.
It is not related to Barbara's post.


The incident to which Barbara refers was widespread exploit of a code vulnerability within the BBS software this forum uses. Many sites were affected once this vulnerability was uncovered and word got out among the hacker "society".

This happened a little over a month ago, and the software company released updates to close the vulnerability. Our webmaster went over everything and corrected the damage that had been done and brought the site back online.