Okay, this is a little embarrassing…

In March or so last year, our forum‘s captcha broke, which meant nobody could create a forum account anymore. And, unfortunately, it turns out our contact form was also broken, which meant that people tried to tell us about it but we didn’t get their messages. So we didn’t even know about about the problem until one of us thought to ask, “Hey, how come we’re not getting any new users anymore?”

That was a couple of months ago. We intended to fix the problem by switching to different forum software that wouldn’t cost money and that would be easy to fix when problems like this arose. Unfortunately, we still have yet to get around to this. So, for the time being, we’ve disabled the forum’s captcha. That means we are now accepting forum registrations again.

And yes, we’ve fixed our contact form, too. If you’ve sent us a message and we haven’t responded, try sending us another one.

Sorry about this, everybody!

We’ve just changed our webserver from Apache to nginx. That basically means we switched the main piece of software that runs the site. (We’re still hosted at Digital Ocean and we still love them.) This means that, hopefully, our recent outages and slowdowns should finally cease. Let us know if anything weird happens.

I have noticed the fanfic section of the site is missing, but it turns out it was already missing even before the switch. I don’t know what’s up with that and I’ll try to fix it soon.

Our gallery had a problem where it wouldn’t accept uploads, but it should be fixed now. Now go fill it with a bunch of silly doodles!

Apparently they went down when FUS moved to DigitalOcean, but The Walrus Fan Club and Pretty Side of Pain are now back.

I’ve also just been made aware of an issue with uploading to FUS’s gallery and am working to fix it.

Apparently some time ago some comment moderation setting got enabled that shouldn’t have been — nobody knows how — and all comments on Sea3on started going to the moderation queue. We’ve fixed that, and we think we’ve posted all the comments that were in the queue. Happy commenting!

If you’ve sent any e-mail to Paul in the past few days, it might have bounced. (Paul, a.k.a. chief, is the guy who runs this website. If you’ve used our contact form, it sends an e-mail to Paul.) But we’ve got our e-mail set up now, so any future e-mails should go through.

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.