California Surveyors Forums

Can anyone explain why this website is unavailable so much in recent months? For years the site was always online, but nowadays I get a "Service Unavailable" message, usually on Sundays (for extended periods) and sometimes on weekday evenings. What changed?

I emailed the Central Office about a month ago, when I noticed this happening and here is the response I received:

Hi Ryan -
The discussion board has been "under attack" by spammers. So much so that it utilizes all the resources and crashes the site. This started earlier this year and was also crashing the main website. We separated the main site from the discussion board so that when the discussion board is attacked it does not affect the main website.

Apparently, spam attacks on discussion boards are common. One thing we have implemented this week to hopefully help with this problem is a robots.txt file that is suppose to stop the bots from "seeing" our discussion board. We hope this will work and are keeping an eye on the traffic.

We are using an older version of vbulletin. We have actually been using vbulletin since the very first version. Prior to upgrading to new versions we also conduct some preliminary research. We stopped upgrading vbulletin for two reasons; first, the new versions are a stable software and secondly, the user interface is drastically different. vBulletin lost their original programmers and have not released a good version since the one we are using.

We have looked at some new platforms. However, all seem to have the same issues with spammers. Additionally, switching to a new platform we cannot guarantee that we could convert all our user profiles and import all the current discussion.

We are continuing to monitor the discussion board and will continue to look for viable alternatives. We will also include a report on this in the next Central Office report. In the meantime, if you see the discussion board is down, send us a quick note, and we can reset the resource file.

Thanks!
Crissy

Cool. A robots.txt file can also prevent google and bing from indexing the site and reporting search results and de-list the site from archive.org. Makes the site anonymous and keeps our secrets and dirty laundry private!

Although, honoring robots.txt is voluntary, so I doubt bad actors (spammers?!) will be any nicer.

Corrent google searches yield:

vbulletin - California Land Surveyors Association
clsaforum.californiasurveyors.org/
A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.

What's the deal with the seven Forum categories for the various committees and PPC and County Surveyor, that so far have never been used?

Just wondering.

Thank you.

Mark,

They do get used in varying amounts. If you don't have the password for any of those private forums, they will show as never having been used.

I belong to two of those committees and each of those forums get used spradically, depending upon committee activity. You only get to see the posts, or even the past activity data for those forums that you are able to log in to.

I've heard that the County Surveyors forum is fairly active.

I've heard that the County Surveyors forum is fairly active.

I wouldn't know - that's an exclusive private board.

I thought govt was supposed to be transparent.

FYI, the "Service Unavailable" message was up again when I first checked this morning at around 6:30.

I must be one of the lucky ones, as I haven't had the access issue. I guess I come on line at the right time.