PonyFans.com Message Board Update

[SmooPower]

As most of you have probably noticed, we have had some severe performance issues over the past month. This started back on 12/20/2004 when the Santy worm (http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_130471.htm) attacked our message board and several thousand other message boards over the Internet. While the worm didn't succeed in defacing our message board, as was its intent, it did do something. During the attack, our host suspended the PonyFans.com count as the worm was causing an inordinate amount of activity in the software.

Once we patched the message board and got it back up and running, something was obviously wrong. The board would take a long time too load, and occasionally it wouldn't load at all. Finally, action had to be taken, as the board in that state wasn't beneficial to anyone.

So we tried the following to fix the problem:

1) Moved the database from one format to another: The current format of the database didn't allow us to perform routine backups, nor was our message board software written with our type of database in mind. We switched database types hoping that we would see performance increases, but this was not the case.

2) Deleted old posts: Thinking that perhaps the database was overloaded with data (we have over 84000 posts on PonyFans.com), we tried deleting any post that had not been replied to in over a year. It was quickly learned that this didn't help - the performance issues remained.

3) Moved the message board to a new website: We've moved our forum, for the time being, to SmooPower's personal account (http://www.glass4.com/). This seems to have fixed the problem as it was not involved in the worm attack and thus seems to have no performance issues.

Unfortunantly, during the last week while we searched for a solution to our problems, some of the posts were lost. Also, a couple of posts seem to be misapplied to certain users, or are located in the wrong thread. We apologize for all of this. Our goal is to provide a solid online community where SMU supporters can come together, and unfortunantly we've had some setbacks over the past two and a half months. Hopefully our technical issues are resolved for the time being and we can get back to talking about the Mustangs.

-PonyFans.com
http://www.ponyfans.com/msgboard/index.asp