Seb
April 23rd, 2008, 11:31 AM
If you are a regular visitor to PS3Forums you will probably have noticed over the last month that PS3Forums has been running extremely slowly. The reason for this was too much traffic hitting our servers and it exposed other previously unknown issues with our code. Then; just after we identified this problem, the forum was hacked and this compounded the problems severely. It meant we could not run the optimizations we wanted to becuase the site was no longer stable and the optimizations were not likely to work as intended. So the result was that we had to do a complete reinstall of the servers; wiping the OS's on all of the machines and reinstalling the application code for both PSU and PS3Forums. This process from start to finish took about two weeks; and you will probably have noticed over the last 48 hours the site being down for large periods of time.
The reason for this was that the process had to be done under strict time constraints (in order to minimize the downtime) and this has churned up a few new display issues which whilst relatively easy to fix can be numerous and so we would appreciate any feedback on these as possible in the suggestions/comments (http://www.ps3forums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=16) forum. We are also aware that the intruder left some code in the forums and we are working to remove this. So if you receive a request to install ActiveX components; do not accept them. Also if you spot another suspicious links do not click on them. We do not know what this code does but we can only assume it has malicious intent so we recommend to all members to run a virus scan on your PC and make sure you have firewalls enabled when browsing the site.
The good news is we have since managed to apply some (not all) of the optimization tweaks we planned and load has dropped dramatically so any feedback on forum speed or PSU speed would be appreciated. And we will be applying more optimizations shortly so it should get better; especially once we have removed all traces of the hacker code. There are now lots of smaller things to fix with both PSU and PS3Forums and we will doing these over the next few days. I predict we will be back better than ever in the next couple of days. Finally I would also like to extend a big apology to all members for the inconvenience this caused. I think we fantastic community here; and all I can say is I'm confident PS3forums will be operating significantly better than ever very soon and I'm looking forward to putting these issues behind us!
The reason for this was that the process had to be done under strict time constraints (in order to minimize the downtime) and this has churned up a few new display issues which whilst relatively easy to fix can be numerous and so we would appreciate any feedback on these as possible in the suggestions/comments (http://www.ps3forums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=16) forum. We are also aware that the intruder left some code in the forums and we are working to remove this. So if you receive a request to install ActiveX components; do not accept them. Also if you spot another suspicious links do not click on them. We do not know what this code does but we can only assume it has malicious intent so we recommend to all members to run a virus scan on your PC and make sure you have firewalls enabled when browsing the site.
The good news is we have since managed to apply some (not all) of the optimization tweaks we planned and load has dropped dramatically so any feedback on forum speed or PSU speed would be appreciated. And we will be applying more optimizations shortly so it should get better; especially once we have removed all traces of the hacker code. There are now lots of smaller things to fix with both PSU and PS3Forums and we will doing these over the next few days. I predict we will be back better than ever in the next couple of days. Finally I would also like to extend a big apology to all members for the inconvenience this caused. I think we fantastic community here; and all I can say is I'm confident PS3forums will be operating significantly better than ever very soon and I'm looking forward to putting these issues behind us!