NOTICE: WEB SERVER ISSUE SATURDAY.

[HellBelly]

Some of you may have noticed that the website was down Saturday for a few hours. I was away all weekend and did not have access to my PC.

An e-mail from Mark in my inbox Sunday night was my first hint that something happened Saturday with the website. Didn't think much of it because it was up and running fine when I checked it.

Monday morning at work I get a message from my web server host, explaining that he had an incident Saturday which pretty much bogged down and eventually crashed the server. Some hackers accessed his web server and began pushing excessive amounts of spam though PHPNuke's web mail function. This is not uncommon, because ISP's are cracking down on spammers and the spammers latest trick to get around being banned from there ISP, is to route their spam through someone else's web server.

This happened Saturday, there were 153,000+, Yes 153 THOUSAND Plus e-mails going out in less than an hour, this eventually killed the server. My web host disabled all PHPNuke based websites on his web server and disabled the web mail function on these website. The issue is currently resolved, but may require me to upgrade to a different version of PHPNuke in the near future. Website is back to normal and NO personal information was accessed.

My Website host did notice an issue with the website that has me a tad concerned. This is in regards to the "Notify me when a reply is posted" function when posting a message. This function sends an e-mail to you when someone replies to your topic. This function is sending out about 6,000 e-mails a day. I would like to ask everyone to please not use this function with every post you type, I understand the need for it, I just ask that you please limit the use. Thanks for your understanding.