Forum upgrades being uncooperative

We upgraded the forums this afternoon (sorry for the lack of a warning) and they did not go as smoothly as we had hoped. The forums do seem to be back up and running, but some of the hooks and extra features are being dildos. Just be aware that there may be some intermittent problems as we try to work them out.

Pretty much working again

We seem to be back up and running although there are still some issues that we are working out. You can login and everything but beware of minor intermittent issues for the next day or two. There may be small bugs that come and go as we work on the site.

Almost working

BinRev is back up for the moment, but it is basically read-only right now. You will not be able to login due to a PHP configuration issue that we are still working on.

BinRev down again

It looks like something updated overnight and caused apache/PHP to break. Apache still works and our non-PHP based sites work fine, but all PHP based stuff (including binrev.com) are all down.

Who do not think that this is a hack or attack at this time, just a simple configuration issue. It should be resolved soon.

We got 0wned!

Binrev.com is down. We were attacked as part of "the summer of HAX" which is a movement of black hat hackers who attack "white hat" sites. I always thought of binrev as more grey hat, but I guess they thought otherwise. I wouldn't mind teh attack itself so much except that they deleted everything in the process. The destruction is the part that I disagree with.

Anyway, because I am going out of town on Wednesday and will not be back until Thursday of next week, the site will be down until further notice. We have some backups (at the very worst case, I have backups from before the forums upgrades but hopefully we have more recent backups on an off-site server) but I do not have time to restore them right now. Perhaps some of the other guys on the team will be able to do something while I am gone.

Sorry about this everyone. People don't like me personally and they don't like binrev so unfortunately, we all pay the price. If I do not have recent backups, this may be the end of binrev anyway. It was costing too much money and time which I do not have so it may be bye-bye binrev.

Our first time hacked, may also be our last. They may have done me a favor.

That didn't last long...Server load spiked

The server was just overwhelmed with users and could not keep up with the load. I had to take it back offline. Once again, too bad, so sad. I am going to bed for the night soon and the forums will be offline until further notice.

UPDATE: I decided to leave the forums turned on overnight to see if the server catches on fire. If it does, then it was God's will that BinRev close down forever.

Back online...for now

OK you unhappy campers. The horrible terrible site that is binrev.com is once again open for business. I am sure you will come rolling in and begin complaining about how terrible it is right away.

Tough S#it! It is what it is. Deal with it.

Minor tweaks left

Normally, I would bring it back up and work through the tweaks while you guys are able to get posting again. But since you guys must have everything perfect or you will bitch and complain, then I am keeping the board down until I have everything completed to *my* satisfaction.

Of course none of *you* complaining dickw@ds are *ever* satisfied with any of the FREE services that we provide, so I can't do anything about that, nor do I care anymore.

Time for bed!

Last night I stayed up really late and put myself out to get these forums running again under the assumption that it would be appreciated. Now that I learned that my time is not appreciated at all, I am going to call it a night and hit the bed.

The site will be back up sometime this week. I don't know...no rush, right?

Taking my sweet-@$$ time...

Thats right, I am still working on the site upgrade, but I am taking my sweet ass time. I even stopped to watch some TV and have a sandwich (peanut butter, if you must know). I am no longer rushing to please people who cannot be pleased.

You ungrateful jerks can sit and wait (or leave, once again, I remind you of that option).

Have a nice day!

F$% your status!

No one reads it anyway and you are just going to bitch. I don't know why I care enough to spend my time. Go somewhere else.

Slow server is slooooooow...

We are aware that there are some issues with the server being slow. this is because the rebuild of the database means that nothing is cached and every query has to hit the server and build a cache at least once per thread. Or at least I hope that is the only problem.

Right now, only 3% of the post content is cached. As each person views a thread, it will cache it and that will make it faster for everyone as it it builds up.

While that happens, I put the site into "performance mode" which means that some of the more CPU intensive features are disabled temporarily. You may get messages that say that you are not able to access something, but it is not because of security, it is because they are temporarily turned off.

Hopefully I can rebuild the cache manually overnight tonight when there are fewer users online. Either way, it will take a day or two to rebuild the cache. Bear with us.

It's alive

The forum is rebuilt and back in action as of about 8 AM This morning.

It is drastically different, so spend some time familiarizing yourself with some of the new features. Post any bugs or problems in the forums themselves so that I can address them.

There will be some smaller, additional features that are rolled out over the week, but they will be minor and cosmetic in nature.

Enjoy!

only halfway done...

I am afraid to announce that the rebuild process is only halfway done as of 12:30 and I have to work in the morning. I am afraid that I will have to hit the bed soon and the site will probably be down all night.

While it is rebuilding, however, I was able to get a lot of the pre-configuration and customization done that I was not going to get to until later in the week so when it does come back up, it will have lots of new features:

1) A working reputation system in place. Know which users suck and which users are elite.
2) HAL = HAcking Links. A Links system that users can contribute to. All users can help build a nice resource of links that we can all share.
3) Upgraded blog, gallery, and forum system.
4) Better reporting system for faster response to SPAM and trolls.
5) A new portal as the official landing point of binrev.com instead of the old PHP/HTML green and black page.

And that is just scratching the surface. It will be worth the wait!

Upgrade taking longer than expected...

We did the upgrade in a test environment and it did not take this long however, that was a smaller limited record test database. When we upgraded the live database, which has over 336,000 posts, it is taking a good bit longer to rebuild every post.

Once we get the post database rebuilt, I will probably bring the board active again overnight and I will do the rest of the less-intrusive upgrades over the course of the week.

I think the forums will be down at least another 1-2 hours tonight. I hope to have them back up by Midnight, but I am at the mercy of the machine right now.

Sunday night = upgrade night

ATTENTION ALL USERS:

I am making some major upgrades to the site including the forums. The site will be enormously unreliable for the new several hours. The forums will be taken down so please finish up your posts by 7 PM EST. The site will likely be down for anywhere from 1 to 3 hours. The new and improved BinRev will be back up Sunday night (hopefully) by 9 PM.

Know in advance that it will look quite a bit different. We will be on a default skin until we get some graphics work finished up. I know some of you will be complaining heavily about the changes, but you should know now that we have been discussing these changes and testing them for quite some time now. The decision has been made. Deal with it.

UPDATE: You now have until 7 PM EST on 07/05/2009 - The backup is still running and will take longer than I expected. You get an extra hour.
UPDATE: You now have until 8 PM EST on 07/05/2009 - The backup is still running and will take longer than I expected. You get another extra hour.


NOTE: This downtime will only affect binrev.com and none of the other sites will be affected other than possible slowness due to server load during the upgrade.

Software updates

Be aware of possible intermittent problems or downtime this week as we do some software upgrades. We will try to minimize the downtime, and do not anticipate any problems at this time. Check back here for updates.

back up!

The server is back up. There was a kernel update that was not cooperating, but the server should be back up and running.

What are you still doing here? Get over there and post!

Down since 2 AM 03/19/2009

The server is down again today due to security updates that were installed. Apparently they were so secure that they took the whole box down. Security doesn't get any better than that.

The hosting company is working on it as we speak. Keep trying and it will hopefully be up soon.

Still down as of 4:30

Just an update that they are supposedly finishing up work and the sites should be back up within the hour. I will be unavailable the rest of the evening, so this will be the last update until late tonight.

BinRev down Friday afternoon

Our hosting company lost power due to equipment failure so binrev.com and all related/hosted sites are down until further notice. This includes docdroppers, hacktv, HPR (Hacker Public Radio), the DDP Blawg, StankDawg.com, WH4F, and pretty much all of our sites.

We were not busted/arrested/raided or whatever else might be running through your head. We also were not taken down by caro for financial reasons.

This is out of our control and their techs are working on it 24/7 since it obviously affects all of their clients. Do not bother emailing or contacting me or anyone on the site about it. It will be back up when they get the hardware replaced.