Unfortunately the message board we debuted a week or so ago has been trouble for me since day one. It was devised as a solution to the 300-500 spambots per day (updated: now 2000 per day) that hit our comments (even if 99% are stopped from being visible in public, they still hit the server). But right off the back, a vulnerability in the 3rd party forum skin used was exploited and again the server had a bunch of junk files dumped into it (similar to a Denial Of Service), thankfully stopped before it could affect the site itself.
Oddly, of my small group of websites, the others of which are several times larger and more visible than Retro Slashers, spammers and hackers tend to largely leave those alone. I don’t know what it is about this site that makes it ground zero for mostly Russian-based bots attacking it by the minute.
Things looked to be back on track a few days ago when I put on a new skin for the forum that seemed pretty good. We had stability – and members seemed to be responding favorably to the digs too. Yesterday however, the place was hit with a completely different (not spam related) technical problem, one so frigging complex I can’t begin to explain it, little own resolve it.
The time this has taken over the past week has eaten into time on film projects I’ve been working on, so clearly this cannot go on. It’s always a case of fixing one thing only for another to arise. Therefore, it’s with sadness [for those that enjoyed the concept of having a forum here] that I announce the message board will not be coming back. We’ve got by without one for several years so in the scheme of things this decision has no real impact. It was simply not meant to be.
As for the sucky comment moderation in existence due to the spammers, I will see if there’s anything further I can do about that, but if that can’t be resolved with any real degree of satisfaction for both you and I, I’ll have to permanently close them too.
However, you can count on Retro Slashers to continue providing quality coverage of the underrated subgenre as we’ve been doing since 2004.
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