As you may have noticed, the forums were shut down for the past day or so due to the vBulletin issue recently identified. We decided this was the best course of action since it was unclear initially what the vulnerability was and who was affected. As you all know, we take security very seriously, and we didn’t want to jeopardize anyone’s information.
The problem ultimately ended up being caused by some insecure installations on one of vBulletin’s own test servers, and the fix was simply to update vBulletin to the most recent 4.x release and delete the install directory. That has been done, and there’s no evidence of any data compromise for this forum. As you’ll notice, Trevor hasn’t applied all his design magic to the new code yet, but he’ll be updating it in the days to come; we didn’t want to delay forum access while he’s working on it.
This whole issue, however, has brought up a couple questions that we want your feedback on.
#1: Is a forum the best tool for the job?
Forums certainly provide a straightforward and easily-navigable way to ask/answer questions and generally converse about different topics. However, there are other tools out there these days that satisfy similar goals. Things like Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange, etc, offer a more interactive and social way to provide Q&A functionality and generally build community. They also have the benefit of being much more shareable, making it easier to build out and grow a community.
Which all leads to the next question… #2: If we were to move to another community tool, what would it be? Or perhaps what would they be?
For example, would an InterWorx subreddit satisfy your needs as a user? In your eyes, what would the pros and cons be? Or do forums remain the best way to go?
Looking forward to your feedback