I’m not sure why this thread doesn’t exist yet, but here!
I’ve updated the forums so that the “Member News” area of the forums is viewable to all forums-goers that are logged in, but only can be posted in by FWG Members.
On another note, if you are a full FWG member and your forum profile does not reflect that, PM me! I’ll fix that for you. It’s a fully manual process, so it’s not easy to keep up with.
So this seems as good a place as any to post this.
So the recent downtime was 100% due to the shoutbox. I’m not sure if the forum updated to a new version and made the shoutbox incompatible or what the actual issue was, but essentially anyone that accessed the forums and could view the shoutbox got flagged by mod_security as being a threat of some kind, and thus the constant 403 errors.
If you’re seeing this, you’ve probably already cleared your cache so you can access this, or you somehow got logged out since the last time you’ve seen the shoutbox (which means the issue didn’t affect you).
What does this mean? Well it means no more shoutbox, starting immediately. Sorry, guys! It was flimsy software to begin with, and I guess it was just a matter of time before it was taken down. That means the Thursday Coffeehouse Chat will either need to move, or will be canceled.