Post: #1

Hey folks,

We are going to be changing settings on the server a little later today so that all traffic to PheroTruth passes through a third party service that provides an additional layer of firewall and intrusion blocking.

This probably isn't necessary as we already have a hardware firewall and server intrusion blocking, but the myBB website and forum were hacked a couple of weeks ago, and although it appears that it was their server that was hacked and not the forum software, we feel it's better not to take a chance.

We have tested the service on another forum that we use for testing functionality and compatibility of modifications to be made to PheroTruth, before actually incorporating them here, and everything seems to work fine, with the exception of the spellchecker we added the other week, which we will have to give up.

Since most modern browsers either have a spellchecker built in or available as a plugin, the trade off seems well worth it.

But, if anyone experiences any problems or cannot access PheroTruth, please let us know by sending us an email at: [email protected]

Thanks for your help!

Post: #2

The new CloudFlare security has now been implemented and it looks like the spell checker still works. We were notified of a glitch with the Shoutbox, which was due to a couple of performance enhancements the service provides that were incompatible with the forum, but disabling those enhancements was a 5 second fix.

You guys will probably also see a slight improvement in page load times and overall snappiness of the forum too, as one of the features CloudFlare provides is to store and serve static copies of websites on a global network of 14 servers, and poll our server for the dynamic database content.

For anyone that's interested, here's a picture of where the servers are located:



As to the increased security provided, here's how CloudFlare describes it:

Quote:CloudFlare leverages the knowledge of a diverse community of websites to power a new type of security service. Online threats range from nuisances like comment spam and excessive bot crawling to malicious attacks like SQL injection and denial of service (DOS) attacks. CloudFlare provides security protection against all of these types of threats and more to keep your website safe.

CloudFlare's technology automatically detects new attacks that arise against any website on its network. Once CloudFlare identifies that there is a new attack, CloudFlare starts to block the attack for both the particular website and the entire community. This also means the longer you are on CloudFlare, the better the protection becomes.