Update Archives

Archive for December, 2005

December 05, 2005

Network Update

Posted by the TAFL Senior Staff at 9:48 pm GMT-0800 [Permalink]
Filed under TAFL Network Status

First and foremost, it appears we have been almost entirely unblacklisted, as we only received one bounce today, from Gmail, and that was the past 24+ hours or so. We hope to have the forms online tomorrow at some point, subject to Danielle’s rather insane work schedule. Johan has been scouring them for flaws, and has rewritten the one that was exploited, from scratch.

Also, in an effort to reduce our server footprint, we have secured an IPB license (thanks to the generous donations of our staffers!!) and upgraded the boards; however, Danielle was dismayed to find that the upgrade process, our board being over a dozen releases behind current, completely destroyed our customized board skin. The board will be offline tonight and hopefully will launch again sometime tomorrow, after she has a chance to do more damage control.

Regrettably, some posts and data were lost from the message board: all message board posts, updates and changes made from 10 am – 5 pm, on December 5, were lost. All data, posts, etc prior to 10 am are still intact, but any avatar changes, new topics or posts, or adjustments to your profile made after that time, as well as any new members that registered in that time period, were lost. Our apologies for this inconvenience, this data loss was quite unexpected.

Thank you for bearing with us as we repair the damage, and we hope to launch a mostly-complete, fully-functional TAFL, as you know it and love it, tomorrow. :D

December 02, 2005

Blacklisting UPDATE

Posted by the TAFL Senior Staff at 4:37 pm GMT-0800 [Permalink]
Filed under TAFL Network Status

After quite a bit of research, we managed to trace down the email problems to one major blacklist, who posted a general alert on November 30 about the type of attack and spam sent — indeed, this was the attack that got TAFL as well. Since it most definitely was not just us hit by this, the blacklist was quite prompt in replying, and promises that we will be removed from the blacklist by tomorrow.

Danielle called AOL’s Postmaster tech support as well (toll-free, what the hey) to make sure that TAFL is whitelisted on their servers as well, so barring any further complications, TAFL forms should be back online tomorrow, EXCLUDING the Change Email form. As that was the one exploited, it will be down until further notice while it is completely rewritten to no longer have the weak points it currently does.

We are still dealing with our host and some overage issues that hopefully can just be pinned to the spam attack, but as the blacklisting was most debilitating, we are quite relieved to announce that this looks to be mostly behind us, and that TAFL should be back to full functionality this weekend.

Thanks, as always, for your patience.

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