As the title says, this is a post that shouldn’t be needed.
The subject: UKChatterbox’s outages, this isn’t just the outage within the last 2 weeks, this goes back to July 1st.
The post on the UKChatterbox “Service Status Page”:
There was a disruption to both the web and chat services from 18:00hrs Friday 1st July 2011 to 21:00hrs Sunday 3rd July 2011 due to a machine failure. This has now been resolved.
What happened was, (and this will no doubt be denied by them) was that the website was attacked using a popular form of exploit (SQL Injection aka sqli), this is when a user inserts extra characters and commands for example, when using a login form, to carry out tasks such as logging a user in as an admin, returning information that shouldn’t be available publicly. UKChatterbox has had problems with sql injections in the past, and apparently never bothered to fix them properly or learn anything, the website (whilst most users are blindly happy with it’s presentation) is full of old, out-dated code. Updating the code to use newer methods of accessing databases can stop this. Incidentally the recent bold red maintenance message on the homepage was fluentcode fixing these issues now they’ve been made fully aware of them.
Anyway, back to UKChatterbox’s delayed downtime notices. Their next step was a server migration:
July 6th 2011: A major migration of the UKChatterbox website has been performed in order to remedy earlier problems. Access to the website may
