CUF Glitches

[Jeff Lebowski]

So what do you all think of the new look? I kind of dig it.

[BlueK]

So what do you all think of the new look? I kind of dig it.

Looks good. Thank you for your hard work in getting it working again!

[Clark Addison]

I was kind of thinking I had been banned so I am happy to hear this. I have been thinking of what controversial or offensive things I may have posted last week.

Thanks for getting things back running!

[Jeff Lebowski]

I was kind of thinking I had been banned so I am happy to hear this. I have been thinking of what controversial or offensive things I may have posted last week.

Thanks for getting things back running!

Whatever you said has been deleted forever!

[LVAllen]

I blame The Donald!

Bad Trump!

[Northwestcoug]

I like the new look. Looks clean and updated.

[Pelado]

Thanks Dude. Not sure how much longer I was going to last without a CS fix.

[Bo Diddley]

Whatever you said has been deleted forever!

CS went down and we lost a couple weeks of posts. Naturally, those were the weeks I finally started posting insightful content. Somehow, all my old dumb posts survived.

Appreciate all the work you do on this.

[Jeff Lebowski]

OK, here is a little longer explanation:

Last week the board went down so I contacted the hosting service. After a long wait, they came back and said that their malware scanner found malicious files and that we had been hacked. I contacted BFM and we chatted about it. The hosting service put it back online and a few posts were made. At some point, I fired up the Claude Chrome extension and had it take a look at the site via the cpanel interface. cpanel is an admin page you can access via the hosting service to look at the website files, the database, etc. The Claude extension allows you to give Claude access to certain tabs on your browser so it can take over and click links, edit things, etc. It asks permission before every step it takes and it generally won't delete anything - rather it tells me what to delete and why and then I delete it.

Anyway, Claude scanned the website and then it searched the internet and looked through vbulletin forums and told use that we were hacked by a recently discovered vulnerability that impacted vb forums all over the world. Furthermore, it determined that the initial scan and deletion by the hosting service was incomplete and that there were still lots of malicious files on the site, hence the continued problem. We took the site offline again and started cleaning things. The hosting service does backups every day, so we started experimenting rolling back to a particular date and then rescanning for malware. Eventually, we settled on July 15 as the safe rollback date. Claude was invaluable in this process. It would find issues and then craft messages for me to send to the support ticket.

Once we rolled back, then we needed to patch the software. We determined that our only option was to upgrade from VB5 to VB6, but Claude determined that to do that we needed a new version of PHP and MariaDB on the server. The hosting service said we needed to move to a new server to make that happen. So that process took and entire day.

Oh by the way, vbulletin will install your upgrade for you, but charge you $450. They will also host your site and keep you upgraded, but that costs $75 per month. We pay about $20. Upgrading is a huge technical PITA, but by this point I was feeling very confident with Claude so we decided to go the DIY route.

I purchased and downloaded VB6 and asked Claude to do the upgrade. That went beautifully. Along the way, it cleaned out a ton of junk from the website - old files, backups, unused stuff, etc.

Anyway, here we are. Legitimately, never could have done this without Claude or just paying through the nose.

Also, the tech support at the hosting service must be out of the USA. I would pose a question and they would often not answer until the middle of the night. It was painful.

[BigPiney]

Looks like I picked the right time to go backpacking. Thanks for all the hard work. The Claude stuff sounds like science fiction - very cool.

[PaloAltoCougar]

Thanks again, JL, for both the work and explanation. That said, given my advanced years and tech ignorance, this is pretty much me.

[USUC]

OK, here is a little longer explanation:

Last week the board went down so I contacted the hosting service. After a long wait, they came back and said that their malware scanner found malicious files and that we had been hacked. I contacted BFM and we chatted about it. The hosting service put it back online and a few posts were made. At some point, I fired up the Claude Chrome extension and had it take a look at the site via the cpanel interface. cpanel is an admin page you can access via the hosting service to look at the website files, the database, etc. The Claude extension allows you to give Claude access to certain tabs on your browser so it can take over and click links, edit things, etc. It asks permission before every step it takes and it generally won't delete anything - rather it tells me what to delete and why and then I delete it.

Anyway, Claude scanned the website and then it searched the internet and looked through vbulletin forums and told use that we were hacked by a recently discovered vulnerability that impacted vb forums all over the world. Furthermore, it determined that the initial scan and deletion by the hosting service was incomplete and that there were still lots of malicious files on the site, hence the continued problem. We took the site offline again and started cleaning things. The hosting service does backups every day, so we started experimenting rolling back to a particular date and then rescanning for malware. Eventually, we settled on July 15 as the safe rollback date. Claude was invaluable in this process. It would find issues and then craft messages for me to send to the support ticket.

Once we rolled back, then we needed to patch the software. We determined that our only option was to upgrade from VB5 to VB6, but Claude determined that to do that we needed a new version of PHP and MariaDB on the server. The hosting service said we needed to move to a new server to make that happen. So that process took and entire day.

Oh by the way, vbulletin will install your upgrade for you, but charge you $450. They will also host your site and keep you upgraded, but that costs $75 per month. We pay about $20. Upgrading is a huge technical PITA, but by this point I was feeling very confident with Claude so we decided to go the DIY route.

I purchased and downloaded VB6 and asked Claude to do the upgrade. That went beautifully. Along the way, it cleaned out a ton of junk from the website - old files, backups, unused stuff, etc.

Anyway, here we are. Legitimately, never could have done this without Claude or just paying through the nose.

Also, the tech support at the hosting service must be out of the USA. I would pose a question and they would often not answer until the middle of the night. It was painful.

Praise be to the data center!

Thank you for all your efforts.

[Donuthole]

Thanks for fixing things up, Jeff. I'm sure that was a PITA, but glad you've become so AI proficient. New look is good.

[Moliere]

Love the option to respond to posts by smilie. I've needed a thumbs down button for a long time....

[Jeff Lebowski]

Yeah, that is nice.

I have no idea what "Set as Answer" means. Do you guys see that or is it an admin feature?