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evandixon

By evandixon
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evandixon

evandixon

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Following our recent hack, we’ve finally restored our infrastructure: the forums have been migrated to IP.Board, and we’ve brought back the wiki.

Special thanks to our entire administration team, @xorhash, and @ReignOfComputer for helping to set things up.

Invision Power Board

Invision Power Board (IP.Board, IPB) is a state-of-the-art forum software with a better security reputation than vBulletin, which we used to use. As vBulletin 4 approached EOL and clearly showed its age, we were considering how to proceed: with vBulletin 5 or something else entirely. The choice, as you can clearly see, has been made.

Some of you have already asked why we didn’t choose the software du jour XenForo. This is due to a few reasons:

  • peer, our new technical administrator, has worked with XenForo in the past and repeatedly hit its (and peer’s) limits.

  • We had an IP.Board license readily available, whereas we’d have had to purchase XenForo separately.

  • Looking at the track record of vBulletin for security, and seeing how XenForo is mostly the old vBulletin guys starting a new project, there were security concerns.

If you have any questions about using Invision Power Board, please create a thread in the Forums Feedback forum.

Staff Changes

Due to concerns in real life, @Alpha has decided to no longer be the primary administrator.  This means he’ll still be around, but will be less active than usual.  We thank him for his hard work maintaining Project Pokémon, and his absence is a loss to Project Pokémon. Helping to fill his place will be myself and @peer, who is our new technical administrator.

Furthermore, we’d like to announce the promotion to super moderator for @Kaphotics, @SciresM, and @theSLAYER.

Data Loss

The hackers deleted a large quantity of data, including some of our more recent backups. As a result, we have lost one year of forum attachments and a up to a few hours of forum posts. The good news is that @theSLAYER, our event moderator, has stockpiled generations of events and several programs, so the situation could have been far worse. @peer is looking into setting up automatic offsite backups to prevent this from happening again.

Hashed passwords are still in the wild.  We strongly encourage you to immediately change your passwords here and everywhere you’ve used the same passwords.  While hashed passwords are not supposed to be reversible (i.e. your password shouldn’t be able to be derived from the hash), vBulletin’s hashing algorithm is very weak, making it that much more important you change your passwords.

The Future

Let’s not let the data loss get us down; it’s time to move forward. With the recent release of Pokémon Sun and Moon, there still cool things to discover, technical details to be researched, and ROM hacks to be created. (Not to mention there’s some cool stuff going on in the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon side of things - more on this later.)

As a reminder, the User-Submitted News forum was introduced a few weeks ago to help bring attention to things such as updates to Save and ROM editors, ROM hacks, and other cool stuff worthy of the front page. If you know of anything noteworthy, post it there so it has a chance to be seen by all!

Closing Statements

We would like to, once more, apologize for any inconvenience caused. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact our staff, create a thread in the appropriate feedback forum, or ask in our IRC channel.

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Guest

Guest

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There's another forum I use which is on IP. Boards, so this is familiar.

So I've logged in with my phone and it was fine, enabled authenticator and did some stuff then left.

Went to login on my computer, and first login attempt just tells me my account was locked and to try again in 15 minutes? :S

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InsaneNutter

InsaneNutter

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Great work in getting the site up and running again, also congratulation to all the staff promoted!

I have a script I've created to backup my own site that will dump MySQL databases and 7z a copy of the wwwroot, before transferring it off site to an SFTP server.

If your running Windows on your webserver your welcome to a copy of that if its of any help.

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Mewtwo Ex

Mewtwo Ex

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So i will add a few word of my own regarding the recent changes and happenings.

I gotta say, getting the news about the site being hacked was quite the shock. I got messaged the same day Sun/Moon were released so with what i can only describe as a bitter taste in my mouth i started playing the new games and thinking about the memories i had here over the past years. I left this place some years ago, but i always came by to check on things knowing the site is still up, and so are my friends here.

One never appreciates something until it's taken away from them. All those moments i've shared with people here were suddenly gone by some hacker group. Ironic isn't it? Regardless of their efforts, PP has risen from the ashes and like a phoenix has breathed new life to our community. I am quite happy things are back to normal, and rather, better than before. The new design of the forums will take getting used to, but i'd like to remind people that it's something that had to be done in order to get things running again and to be safer than before. I welcome the change. Thank you to the team that helped bring back everything!

It's with a heavy heart that @Alpha is stepping down, but i wish him the best in his future. 

And congratulations to the newly promoted staff of our site/community!

With these words aside - GLAD TO SEE YOU BACK PROJECT POKEMON!

 

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evandixon

evandixon

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7 minutes ago, Agu Fungus said:

Great to see it back! Now here's hoping that the downloads for Generation 5 and 6 are eventually restored. So much loss there. :(

If you mean the downloads over in the Event Gallery, we have the files, it just takes a while to upload everything.  The Gen 5 events are coming soon®, and in the mean time, the Gen 6 events can be found in our Gen 6 Event Contribution thread.

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Platinum Lucario

Platinum Lucario

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Welcome back! It's been a long time since I've last come here and posted. I never would've expected the forums to be compromised by a malware attack. The worst thing about malware attacks... is that it encrypts files, rendering them completely unusable. I honestly hope nothing like this ever happens again. It would be horrible to lose more data. Dx

Anyways, I'm glad to see the forum up and running again. ^^

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Deity

Deity

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Looking at the track record of vBulletin for security, and seeing how XenForo is mostly the old vBulletin guys starting a new project, there were security concerns.

This is a very silly reason and hopefully wasn't something of serious considering during the switch. vBulletin was largely secure pre-vB4, which was the point Kier, Mike and Ashley left the Jelsoft team. We've recently seen an IPB hack (exposing plaintext passwords nonetheless) at NB so hopefully you made the right decision. ;)

Edited by Deity
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