Pending upgrade [Update 8 - Done]

[JointCracker]

UPDATE 8
For a long time in planning, finally the upgrade went through successfully! Drupal never had a decent forum solution, which is why I kept waiting for years, keeping us afloat with patches... I loathed the idea to downgrade the forum user experience or to be forced to build and extend my own forum with Drupal. I came to the realization that we probably do not need a full blown CMS, we need a solid forum solution.
A new player called NodeBB entered the market recently, as a spiritual successor of phpBB on a much more modern and interesting technology stack, than Drupal which mostly uses the same old stack as PHPNuke.
This is where we are now.

UPDATE 7
To move forward with this site I plan to swap the meanwhile outdated
PHPNuke CMS architecture with the current top of the line CMS framework Drupal.

Of course I will try to make the transition as smoothly as possible. Stay tuned for exciting new possibilities and much better SEO properties!

Please take part in the currently running poll, so I know your stand on this.

UPDATE 6:
It is amazing how long our sites' old architecture stood it's ground with only minor fixes, it has been almost six years! PHP-Nuke has been a great start but now definitely reached end of life, it is e.g. getting hard to fight off modern spam. It is about time we jump ship. Drupal matured even further after I had the first idea to migrate to it, so now should be a really good opportunity to do just that. I'll start work on this real soon, I'll try to relaunch us as soon as spare time permits. I'll be learning Drupal along the way, this should be a fun ride.

UPDATE 5:
Sometime at 2009/07/21 this site was hacked and everyone was greeted with an authorization request for 'private area'. Unfortunately, I'm still dumbfounded how this happened. The issue has been resolved. I will of course keep an eye on this.

UPDATE 4:
The old infrastructure was unfortunateley hacked yet again on June 22nd 2007 while I was not available for a couple of days. I'm really sorry for the extended downtime due to this badly (or from the hackers' point of view - good) timing. If you notice any downtimes please check again regularly, like you did just now.
Anyhow, the site has been reverted with no data lost whilst patching the newly found loophole.

UPDATE 3:
In an isolated event of unknown error my host provider dropped every single database table of this very site sometime between April 5th and April 6th. For about 24 hours this site site could do nothing but return empty pages.
Meanwhile I have reinstated the database backup from April 5th. I'm terribly sorry for all lost data which might have been created between this backup and the crash on April 6th and for the inconvenient downtime. Please re-enter all data which you have lost. Thank you!

I still wish everyone a happy easter holiday!

UPDATE 2:
After review I learned we have been hacked at least twice. Once today and once over a couple of days in April 2006. The hacker from April even left his name but I won't do the honors to mention him. Needles to say, this hack didn't restrain us in any way.

Todays hacker used the avatar upload feature to upload malicious code.

I removed all traces and closed both loopholes. Unfortunately this means for the time being, avatar uploading is disabled. However, since so few of you, actually used this feature (one did!) , it probably won't be missed much. I'd rather invest my spare free time in the planed major upgrade instead of going for a clean fix with this avatar security problem.

Overall, I feel humbled by all this attention.

UPDATE 1:
Today, 01/05/2007 this site was returning only empty pages for a few hours due to a technical fluke in the GoogleTap component. We have clearly been hacked.

I just reverted this site back to the state it had yesterday night. The database seems fine so I saw no need to revert our data. Thus no data was lost. I'll monitor this.

Forunately, as already announced my plans for 2007 are to upgrade this site to a better CMS system. The then gained higher security niveau is obviously very much needed. This upgrade will fall behind the 1st anniversary but should happen before we turn two.

So I'll take a quick look into the hack which got through to us and close whatever loophole was used.

Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for hanging in there!