Planned Forum Maintenance: 9th/10th January 2006

[richard]

Yes there's another set of patches for the forum software.

I will be taking the forums down during the evening of Monday 9th January (US Central Time) to apply the patches. This will be in the early hours of Tuesday morning (probably 2-4am) for readers in the UK.


Richard

[richard]

Updates have been completed!

One of the main additions in this update has been a limit on the number of failed login attempts that are allowed. We haven't had any trouble so far, but some forums using the same software have been seeing dictionary password attacks. The LNER forums are currently set to lock you out for one hour if you have ten successive failed login attempts.

This limit protects your privacy (making it harder for hackers to login as you), and it helps to protect my website against a denial of service attack.
The best personal defence against a dictionary attack, is to use a secure password. Don't use a simple word. Use a made up word and substitute some of the letters with numbers.

Let me know if you have any problems with the updates.


Richard