Wrong Planet may go down -

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Thank you for your hard work on preserving Wrong Planet! I am glad you could find a solution that works to bring it back! I know I'm not an active member of the forum but this forum means a lot to me and I like checking in now and again.

I've been checking now and then over the months and my chin hit the table today when the site immediately came up.

Welcome back.

It's nice to have it back and to see all you Sweet Peas

Welcome back Retrograde .!

Forums search fixed, including advanced search, though the mobile formatting is still substandard.

We were attacked yesterday by bots that installed some malware, web shells and some phishing site, I anticipated that this would happen. It has been corrected and mitigated. I did some security hardening, and set up a regular check to scan for issues, and finally I did a bunch of performance tuning, the site should be super fast now. How is everyone doing? Any bugs to note?

Thank you for your hard work! It seems to be running smoothly and quickly. I'm happy search is working now, thank you. Sometimes search doesn't work, and shows a screen to try again in a few minutes.. and seconds later I try again and it works so that's great!
edit: 12:32 pm - Yay it seemed to not work for a couple hours there (not sure exact time) but now it's back! yay!

Short period of time this morning "cannot access file". but soon after everything just fine .Thank you again !
Not that I like AI but if there was one that could handle this stuff . Filtering , while maintaining base copy of the site .
For quick recovery . Just a thought . ? Cannot hardly believe such a rotten group of IP actors would be trying to hack or install malware before it had been up for such a short period of time. If all these places wanna build all these data centers and they cant even guarrantee a cleaner internet product in this country , Why would you want to expand such a data center dibocle over the entire USA . Inspite of all the "local" greif the places( data centers ) are creating .?

Last edited by Jakki on 05 Jul 2026, 3:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

You definitely achieved super fast, Jeff.

Can you elaborate please? I am out of the loop, haven't been here in a while. The boards will cease to exist at some point, and there will be no place for discussion anymore?

Also, site was offline today for some time. Not sure if this information will help somehow.

Basically, there is an idea that we make these forums instead live at the address https://classic.wrongplanet.net/forums, which will continue to be fully operational, but we launch a whole new platform, yet to be fully determined, but leaning towards Lemmy, as well as add a couple more features to the site, live chat (text only) is on my mind, but for now the focus is on making the current site as solid as possible before we pivot towards this goal.

As far as the forums being down, sorry, that was just me testing if the site would come back on a basic reboot, and things were learned, and more fixed. Things will probably be spotty for a few days more but it will settle.

EDIT: To make it very clear, there are no plans to kill the forums, but there is a plan to gently provide a replacement for them, while leaving them still accessible for all, at least for the next couple of years unless something drastic happens. But the current software, this exact configuration of what is here on wrongplanet.net, is too difficult to keep maintaining. It is quite old, and very custom. The most that is going to happen as far as you are concerned is, one day when you visit wrongplanet.net in your browser or click a link to it, you may be redirected to the exact same link but instead at classic.wrongplanet.net. The redirect would be visible and there would be an explanation for what is to come and what to expect, both before and after this is to occur.

Unfortunately, this does mean everyone has to register accounts again. This new community page will also be fresh and not much content at first, but these forums will continue to live, fully functional at classic.wrongplanet.net. Eventually, probably not long after the redirect plan, new registrations will not be possible, think a month or two from the time we have the new community software up, just to give people a chance to register a classic account and interact with it. Even further down the road, think a couple years or when hacking and attacks become too intense, the classic page will be read only, no new posts, however, the posts we have can live as an archive forever, is the plan.

I can believe it, it was probably done by a bot as part of a botnet on an infected computer. It was probably done without any human trying to do it specifically. As far as datacenters, they are just a building that provides air conditioning, power, and internet, for a lot of computers that run everything on the internet. They can only guarantee cooling, power, and internet, and physical security to the machines, at best. Everyone on the internet has to deal with what nasty things others on the internet may do and take measures accordingly.

So ,not to belabour the point , but ? if our Country as a federal government has all the Uber capable, space force , CiA ,FBI ,and other unamed orgs that can deal with the issues nationally / internationally . That pertain to trackers hackers etc.and International level Internet criminals . If a little bit of this capability was directed towards the scammers and other bad actors on the net . Making it Too costly for those entities ,or persons operating those entities . To continue to do so. I might feel more proud of the USA . A few lines of some malicious ghost code ,well placed inside a operating system of a otherwise healthy giant data center . Could hold hostage that entirety of the network that may rely on that data center & connected ones. "" Sorry for Philosophizing "" Thanks for response

You give our government, and for that matter, the human race as a whole, far more credit than either of them deserve I think.

Us computer people are notoriously bad at what we do.

Thanks for clarifying, it is a good plan with slow migration, and thanks for doing so much for this community! One last question - there will be probably no way to transfer existent databases (if not users, then at least all the posts) to the new one? Most likely there aren't any good ways to export that from the old software... A bit sad since sometimes i read the old posts, they have interesting information in them. But, since the forum isnt going down soon, then it is too early to be worried about that.

I want to reiterate, the idea is the current site, more or less exactly how you see it now, would just move to classic.wrongplanet.net/forums, and still very much exist, even as this new platform is created. It will just eventually be read only over a long set of two phases, first no new registrations, then eventually maybe even years out from here depending on how hard it is to upkeep, no new posts, but you will still be able to access them, but even as it moves to classic.wrongplanet.net, which may happen sooner rather than later, that doesn't even mean the end is near, and I or someone else on the team, will give notice at least a couple of weeks out of the launch of the new platform to give people a chance to register first from this community and reserve their rightful username and hash out any disagreements.

However, you asked a more specific question about migrating the current data, and that requires a rather unpolished technical answer, here it is straight...

I know a good deal about how these forums and the website are set up as I have troubleshooted it and migrated it before in earlier stages and watched it change. I am happy to describe the challenges if you want to know them.

This is not a clean phpbb even near remotely. It was never a normal phpbb in its whole existence and the schema is unlike any forum still in operation, for sure. Over 12GB of solid text in the database (and that's a conservative estimate), literally millions of posts, which again, isn't even in a normal phpbb and significant modifications were necessary to migrate the forums to this current platform. There is no viable path to upgrade and carry the data, truly. There isn't even a reasonable way to keep the users and passwords.

I looked hard at it and I could expand on the many reasons why we both cannot keep running exactly this forever, as well as why migrating the data is just too difficult, but it's just too old and has become too large and it's too weird to boot.

So, this is where my head is at. The effort to carry the data is extreme, and the reward honestly is small if I can keep this site running for those that want it.