What happened to the lifein19x19 forum? It's back 🥳

It could be a personal grudge, or as simple as the motive for any vandalism: a power trip, the excitement of destroying things.

Curious how close it got. Anyone written a Discourse plugin before?

This forum used to have EidoGo support in a similar manner. Wrapping some SGF text with some tags, or simply attaching an SGF file to a post, would automatically embed the player loading the SGF. This worked fine for a while, but eventually something broke with the integration.

I’ve answered that question already … it probably was simply because L19 used an old version of phpBB with vulnerabilities, and it was abused as a crypto miner.

I’m in contact now with Brian Kirby also, one of the current L19 Admins.

We’ll wait a few days now, and see whether we hear back from Adrian.

So, what we’d need would be these:

• wait for a reply from Adrian,

• access to the Data Base (i.e. latest backup or something),

• a trustworthy member of the Go community who is a phpBB expert, and nerdy enough to do what is needed to …

1. rebuild the forum,

2. update it to the latest version of phpBB (which then shouldn’t have those vulnerabilities),

3. and ideally migrate to Discourse IF it is possible to integrate SGF and playable diagrams.

(Point 3 optional of course, and the IF should be “IFF”, i.e. “if and only if”.)

The question was general, not specific, so I gave a general response, not specific.

sounds like a hefty endeavor

Indeed, and I don’t know whether it can be done — i.e., whether we can find someone who is willing to do the actual work — but IMO it would be a huge loss if all that content would be gone forever.

A simpler minimalist way is to save that forum into some collection of pages we could at least read (but no more interact)?

Should we make a gofundme or a kofi for pitching in? It’s not like we’ll find someone who can pour in countless hours and it could be such a huge task.

I didn’t visit there a lot, but I’d gladly donate to such a cause. Go resources like that should be restored.

Definitely, but it seems that things are going down actually.

The German DGoB (German Go Association) forum was shut down a few months ago; IIRC the reason given was that the admins and/or moderators had to bear some abuse and flaming And now decades of communication and information about Go are lost. Meanwhile the DGoB is reigned by a new presidency, and they created a new forum (also Discourse, BTW), but it doesn’t look like it’s attracting the formerly active forum members, unsurprisingly.

I find all this very frustrating even though I myself haven’t frequented both forums in a long time.

Jordus here. The domain is still accounted for and under my ownership. I have been absent from the scene for a while and just made aware of the situation. I am willing to help in anyway I can.

So … @Jordus,

what and whom do we need?

Copying my own text from LifeIn19x19/Status at Sensei's Library

the data seemingly is NOT lost, “we” need a phpBB expert to repair things and migrate the whole thing to a current version of phpBB where this specific vulnerability has been removed. This probably is a lot of work because the L19 forum software hasn’t been updated in a decade or longer, and there apparently are customizations.

Me, my abilities and strength end here, all I wanted was to connect involved people w/ each other and part of the user base ASAP, to try to help bringing L19 online again ASAP. I am not a coder but I would be willing to donate a tiniest amount.

Would it be easier to restore it in a read-only mode? Export it into plain html so that the historical content would be available?

Then migrating/upgrading is more optional, it could potentially start from scratch for example, even lacking the customisations, or using more modern software or whatever.

The database from Adrian?

Thx … writing him a mail now, and asking him to please come here.

Hey guys, Adrian here! Sorry about what’s happened - I’m very happy to accept any help from anyone here who can dedicate the time to babysit a migration of phpBB from its very old version (3.0.8, released sometime around 2010. It’s almost old enough to drink!) to a recent one that has the latest security fixes.

I’ve brought the board back up for now temporarily, with a few firewall rules in place to stop the one specific attack that I was facing – but given that whatever exploit was used is still unknown to me, it’s quite possible/likely that the script kiddies who found it the first time will do so again from a different botnet/IP and I’ll have to take it down again until a permanent solution is found.

Like I mentioned to Thomas, no data is lost and I do take regular backups. It’s just a matter of getting the software through the upgrade lifecycle of over a decade’s worth of phpBB releases.

If you have the requisite skills, please do e-mail me at adrian@apetre.sc and we can immediately get to work together. I can probably bumble through myself eventually, even if I have to write a custom SQL migration, but it’s time I just don’t have at the moment, and probably won’t have until October.

Anyway, here’s hoping the month-long downtime has thrown the original attacker off the scent enough for them to forget about us for now

Thank you for the update!! <3