Short outage this evening

[klondike]

I'll be porting the forum over to the new server. It's fairly quick and if there is any problem I can quickly point the DNS records back to this server where nothing will have changed.

If you visit while I'm doing the transfer you'll get an admin page saying there is maintenance in progress.

[klondike]

All done now - If you get any errors try to take a screen dump and/or copy any messages and/or tell me exactky what you did and what happened.

I'm not expecting to see any problems. The server was been working OK for over a week and the only forum change was updating a couple of mods to their latest versions and neither should have any effect on forum users.

My downdetector spotted it....

Hello Mark,

The latest incident has been resolved and your monitor is up again in Europe. Good job!

Monitor name
Letschat latest user change
Checked URL
https://letschat.club/index.php
Root cause Keyword Does Not Exist
Incident started at 2026-11-04 20:26:37
Resolved at 2026-11-04 21:07:14
Duration 40 minutes and 37 seconds
Location Falkenstein, Germany - IP 142.132.180.39

It alerts me when there is a new signup too. Inevitably a spammer or course.

[Mups]

OK,  thanks for telling us its done now.   

I have forgotten why you said you were doing it in the first place now though?  

[klondike]

Serious vulnerabilities discovered in PHP which runs well over half of the internet including this forum.

https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/news/critical-security-issue-affecting-php

It's about time the server was updated anyway as I've not done any updates since I first set it up and it was running a pretty outdated version of PHP.

We are hardly likely to be the target of hardened cybercriminals but we do get loads of dodgy signup attempts and sooner or later there will be some scripts around to exploit the new vulnerabilities so there could be a visit from some of those which would crash the server and maybe lose some data.

I have the site DNS registered with Cloudflare so it sits behind their proxy servers - they get any requests first and block some but not all malicious visits. I see a lot of failed hacking attempts in the logs. That's what some of those "Guests" are that you've asked about shown at the bottom of the home page -  Most Online Ever: 1,361 (August 04, 2026, 05:54:01 AM)

From pensionersforum - Most Online Ever: 3932 (Apr 18, 2026, 07:22:18 PM)