Some users weren’t able to log into the forum because their account was set to use the Warrior skin, which is currently unavailable. I’ve worked around this by disabling the Warrior skin for now. Don’t worry, it’ll be back soon! Hopefully you should be able to log in now, at least.

Be sure to read the post below this one if you haven’t already.

You may have noticed that we were hacked again about a week ago and, as a result, the forum has been down a few days. Well, good news! I’ve cleaned everything up (much better than I did last time) and everything seems to be in working order. That means, yes, the forum is finally back! But wait! Remember that, although the chance is small, the hackers may have gotten your forum password. If you’re concerned about this, you should change your password, not just on the forum, but on every site where you used that password. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Wondering why the forum was down so long? A big part of it was Bluehost requires us to submit a support ticket to wipe the server. I kept the forum down during the waiting period because the server could be wiped at any time and I didn’t want anyone to write a big post and lose it in the wipe. Well, after waiting about 60(!) hours for Bluehost to get off their butts and wipe the server, we gave up and signed up for DigitalOcean instead. I think DigitalOcean is a lovely host and look forward to working with them.

Now to make sure we never get hacked again…

By the way, if any of you have e-mailed Paul (chief) during the outage, when FUS was down completely, the e-mail may have been lost. Maybe not. So if you sent in anything, go ahead and send it again just to be sure, OK?

The forum’s finally back up. We also upgraded IP.Board in the process, so things might be extra wonky for the moment. But it should be usable, at least.

We finally got the server wiped and everything reinstalled. That took a lot longer than I thought it would because it turned out wiping the server meant filing a support ticket with our webhost, then waiting, and waiting, and waiting for them to get around to it. But that’s done and we’re mostly back now.

The forum is still down at the moment, but most of the rest of the site, including Sea3on, should be available now. A few things may be missing or not acting quite right, so bear with us as we get things up and running…

I have some grave news, amigos.

On May 30th, FUS was hacked by a spammer. We still don’t know for 100% certain how they got in, but I’m 99% certain they got in through a WordPress exploit, since our WordPress was rather out of date. The main thing they did, possibly the only thing, was put up a bunch of spam pages and maybe send out spam e-mails.

But there is also a chance they got ahold of the forum database, including the password table. The passwords are encrypted (or more accurately “hashed”), which means they cannot just read your password, but they might be able to decode some of them. If you reused your FUS password anywhere else, such as for an e-mail account, we highly recommend changing those passwords just to be safe. Also, though we think the chance is tiny, FUS may still be compromised for the moment. Now, the chance they got or will get your password is very small, but it’s not impossible.

We think we have patched up the security holes, but the nature of security is one can never be too sure. So what we’re going to do is torch the site and run. *ahem* I mean, we’re going to make a big backup of everything, wipe the server, and then put everything back in as secure a manner as possible. That means that, within a day or two, FUS is going to be down for probably a few hours. We won’t lose anything; when we’re back up, everything will still be there and, we hope, it will look as though nothing had ever happened.

We deeply apologize for the inconvenience. Heck, it’s a hassle for us too! But bear with us and everything should be fine within a couple of days, OK?

Ladies and mentlegen, this is your captain speaking. We have just finished moving FUS to our new host. Some of you may be seeing new.sonicsatam.com in the address bar instead of www.sonicsatam.com or sonicsatam.com. This is a temporary measure and should go away within the day; our true URL remains simply sonicsatam.com. By all means, let us know if you find anything weird anywhere on the site. Thank you for flying Fans United.

– Kef