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http://www.punres.org/viewtopic.php?id=1516

This does not quite give an accurate picture of the development community.

Unless I am mistaken, at the moment there is only really one core developer - Rickard. Everyone else does important stuff (inc Paul) like CSS, layout, mods, styles etc, which while important and useful is essentially secondary.

So while it is true that there are lots of people developing around punBB nowadays, if Rickard got hit by a bus, PunBB as an application would also be stopped in its tracks.

I know the source code is GPL'd and there are lots of talented people about who could probably keep the project going forward in Rickard's (theoretical) absence, but at the moment he is the only guy doing core code - fixing security bugs, building 1.3 etc.

That is a bit of risk you may have to accept in adopting PunBB.

I mean, Rickard's young, he's healthy and he still appears enthusiastic about the project so you can probably bank on having quite a few years of PunBB ahead, but at the end of the day it is still just one guy's project.

Have a look at the war-stories over at the AdminZone about people's forums being hacked, and how, for some possible ideas about the way your site may have been compromised:

http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/foru … y.php?f=24

Read a few of the 'my forum has been hacked' posts to see how others have also been affected using a variety of forum packages (not just pun), and the conclusions they drew.

There are lots and lots of ways your hack could have been done, in short.

Bottom line is: it may be very hard to tell sometimes exactly how the attack was done, esp. if you aren't able to do the forensics properly due to lack of access to logs, poor change management, no baselines etc. But while it can happen to anyone, you can take some steps to reduce the risk of it happening again.

ie I get a 404 on that link you posted...

Aha. So far so good.

So I guess no one has had experience of spambot attacks on a punbb board then, injecting 'pill link' posts etc.

If that is the case, that's reassuring.

Is your site alive? I can't open it at all.
'Cannot find server or DNS Error' error etc

A very nice job. Consistent well applied colours, fonts and style elements, and a nice fast board. I even like your favicon too.

Dark colour themed boards usually don't work well (for me), but this one does.

HOWEVER it wasn't a good idea though to stick a big 220k, 700x1100 pixel PNG image though in your posting here on punBB... a smaller image would have done the job, if you needed to post an image at all.

And BTW: why does no-one apparently know anymore how to do image compression? That 220k image you posted took me just 1 second to knock down to a 50k GIF or a 52k PNG, with no visible decline in quality. Why waste valuable electrons and bandwidth

Can I suggest you apply a bit more compression to those JPG's you use. Your site was very slow to load

The reason is that your JPG's are HUGE, esp blueforum.jpg (~250k) and rhapsody.jpg (57k). All up your images add up to about 300k!!

There is no excuse for that, esp on a punBB site .

Apply 70% or more compression to those JPGs - they will shrink massively and look no worse for it

Also your background image blueforum.jpg is WAY too large at 700x800!.

You either (a) don't need it at all, or (b) should choose a smaller JPG and have it tile/repeat.

As I mentioned in my original post, 'I know it can be done against the individual punBB admin_files in other ways under *nix and IIS, but this would be easier and tidier.'

.htaccess is fine, and HTTP authentication against specific files is doable too under IIS with no hassle for a site administrator, but most hosting users wouldn't know how to do either. 

Some popular hosting interfaces (ie cPanel) make it possible for users to easily setup authentication against Apache directories, but not files. Hence my suggestion.

And the easier something is to do, the more likely it will be done.

I also have a personal preference for web apps to better segment their files by function to make managing them easier.

punBB does that in part already (/img, /cache, /plugins, /style etc) so logically why not /admin?

Exactly.

If need be, just continue to build that up, not branch the documentation out into a (shudder) wiki.

Ugh. Quit with the wiki's, pls.

What's wrong with an old-fashioned Manual in HTML (and PDF for printing), for God's sake?

I hate wikis. They are almost always SO dis-organised, sloppy and hard-to-use.

Using them for documentation purposes is IMHO a big mistake.

I love Wikipedia, and the wiki concept in general as 'collaborative knowledge sharing' is fine, but everywhere I see wikis used for documentation of software or web-apps it is usually a huge mess.

A good model of how things should be done is, for example, the docs for the ISPconfig hosting control panel:

http://www.ispconfig.org/documentation.htm

Nice! Simple! Usable!

What's not to like?

A wiki like the punres one is fine for collecting user contributed tips and mod info etc, but 'official' app documentation works best the old-fashioned way.