I believe lulu fish fish was referring to SSL certificates, or the lack of in our case. This is when you see a padlock to confirm that the connection is encrypted over HTTPS. This is a necessity for pages which take sensitive details such as billing addresses and credit cards. We don't handle any of that as all transactions go through a payment gateway, i.e. PayPal.
That said, it is now considered best practice to use HTTPS and as such we will be installing a SSL certificate and soon. This will mean that all login sessions will be handled over HTTPS.
The security enhancements I referred to previously were more specifically in regards to software patching which prevent against attacks such as SQL injection attacks which Jess-- kindly explained.
I'm sorry you feel that way but in any case, there is no downgrade option from IPBoard 4.1 to 3.4. It would technically be possible to restore from an old backup meaning we'd lose 6 months of content but to be frank, I'm not doing it.
Thank you
You are right in that this version of the forum software requires more server resources than the old one. As such, we migrated to a new server with more CPU cores, more memory and solid state disks in order to address any performance issues and to add storage capacity to accommodate the increasing size of the database. We also offload to AWS.
As you may recall, I have a lot of admin experience with vBulletin. More than I do with Invision in fact and to be honest my personal preference is vBulletin by some margin. That said, the functionality is significantly different (Moreso than the change from 3.4 to 4.1) and I had concerns that some users may not accept such a significant change.
I agree that the VNC issue could have been handled better but we responded to user feedback as quickly as we could. This was an oversight on my part.
I don't agree about your comments in regards to security being overplayed. Call be paranoid, but I've had to recover 2 forums from SQL injection attacks in 14 years.
- The old version of IPBoard was developed using an older version of PHP. What would you do when PHP 5 is deprecated?
- The old version of IPBoard no longer receives security updates making it vulnerable to future cross-site scripting attacks and SQL injection attacks to name a few possibilities
- The old version of IPBoard is no longer supported. If you encountered a major software issue and required the support from Invision, how would you go about this? We rarely needed to contact them to be fair but when we did, they did not always provide any support because we were using an unsupported version of their software.
I have no doubt that you will come up with at least some answers but these were the challenges we faced and all things considered, we felt the need to apply the update. I don't want to dwell on that too much as it's not something we can revert.
Sorry if I've missed anything. I've just got home from work and now need to do my boating chores!
Rich