Actually they announced at the beginning of November that the forum would be taken offline November 16 and was expected to be offline until the end of November.It has been up and down now for quite some time. I think it was offline for a couple of weeks originally, I reckon due to being hacked but they say not, without giving any reason why it was down.
The reason they gave was that they were switching to a new forum platform that would provide better security (perhaps a nod to the previous hacking issues), require unique user names, provide improved search capability and provide additioal (unmentioned) functionality.
Just before the end of November I noticed that it 'appeared' to be online. There were totally new page designs and you could even login.It then came back online for a while and then went off again "under maintenance". Eventually it came back and looked like they had it sorted but many people were not able to post or reply to previous posts.
What you noticed is that their initial plan of shutting down their forum for two weeks while they switch to a new platform revealed some MAJOR issues and they have finally just put up an 'Under Construction' message. I don't understand at all why they shut down the forum version they were using until they were actually ready to switch.
Someone made an intial version of the new forum publicly accessable and I discovered that you could click on anyone existing profile and see all of the personal info including email addresses. I sent out an email to support with the word EMERGENCY in the subject notifying them of the potential privacy violation exposure.
Even after they fixed that problem the new forum was still publicly available and you could still log on.
The perception I had was that it was an 'internal' site they were trying to finalize before releasing it.
Sometimes you could post, sometimes you couldn't. But you couldn't add any replies.
I still don't understand why they just didn't leave the old site up until the new one was totally vetted.
At least they finally put up an 'under construction page.
And, on the plus side, that page seems to work perfectly!
Statistics: Posted by Douglas — Sat Dec 23, 2023 7:31 pm