djthomas wrote:
I seriously doubt this is the doing of people who oppose our cause.
I fully concur with this assessment
The attacks are about as controllable as spam, and in many cases they really are spam. I've noticed a huge trend as djthomas pointed out. Back in the early 2000 time frame "script kids" looked for exploitable code on your website to deface it. These forums were once defaced by a turkey based hacking group just to make a political statement most people couldn't read. A few months ago someone found a "hole" in the OhioCCW.org website that let you inject content into the website. Instead of using that opportunity to delete our site and try to hurt us they quietly injected content that redirected visitors to websites that paid them for hits. Nobody noticed it because all they wanted was to get those hidden links indexed in google along side our higher search ranking. Nobody here likely ever hit those links. Google eventually figured it out and emailed us to advise us that they were yanking all of our indexing until we fixed it.
The difference is in the past it was about destruction, and today its about profit, at the expense of injecting stuff into your website
without destruction so you don't' react to fix it.
If you look at how we require people to sit there and think about which pictures are cats and which are not (when registering for these forums) you can see how tricky we need to get in order to fight automation. It doesn't take but a few weeks for spammers to "figure out" how to automate a script/robot to circumvent those "CAPTCHA" programs that ask you to read funny letters and type them in. What we use here is genius in design since it draws the images randomly on the fly so that nothing gives away a file name. Newer versions actually change the photo makeup too. Getting into our forums is almost too hard for real people. If we shut that off we'd have hundreds of fake accounts within a few hours.
so the update, a bit late:
- The new website looks horrible. (just kidding)
- It's not going to go public anytime soon, but I'd like to aim for Friday or Saturday nights. Sunday at the latest, even if we need to turn it on with substantially incomplete clean-up.
When you change the dimensions and layout of a website it tends to break things you designed around in the past. For example, the DNPWA and CPZ areas work fine, but there is a bunch of random "code" being presented instead of text. Functional, but cosmetically not what we want to present yet. I hope that the effort were putting into this will give us more opportunities to make the main website a much more useful resource.
If you have ideas about how we can make the main website better for both those of you who know what is going on and the 'prospective new guy" trying to learn the issues and the intricacies of Ohio's laws, go ahead and drop me a PM. I'll read them when I make updates to this thread, and as we move forward we'll see what we can do.
Your heart can't take that again this soon 
