Maintenance on the Forums

[Shin]

Hello fellow Saints' Discussion Forum members

The forums for the website went down sometime yesterday. I spent some time this evening investigating the cause and communicating with the server adminstrator about it. With the help of the adminstrator the cause was found, and after some work the site has been restored.

I restored it to a day ago backup, so a small amount of posts and any private messages after that were lost, my apologies.

As I continue to investigate the cause of the crash, there is a possibility that it was due to some external attempt to damage the website.

I do not know if there was any breach of any information in the database, but I would like to pre-emptively caution members to take any security steps necessary if there was such a breach.

I recommend to all members the following minimum security steps:

1. Change your password to the forum. The password should be 14 characters or longer.
2. If you used your old password to the forum anywhere else, change the password that you used elsewhere as well.

My apologies for the difficulties.

Good evening and God bless us all I pray, and bless this forum and these websites.

[Shin]

After consulting with the webserver administrator, he has found no indications of any malicious activity.

The forum's issue appears most likely to have been due to a disk read/writing error.

Therefore any potential security issues we conclude to be highly unlikely.

Apologies if there was any alarm. I like to be a bit over protective ahead of time in possible security incidents.