DJ Hadoken 7 has this to say:
What happened? That’s a question that can’t be answered entirely in this one post. But I do want to cover one topic: the website itself. To sum it up as simply as possible:
SPAMMED OUT OF EXISTENCE
That answer should be enough for the majority of people. But I will elaborate about some of the backend aspects that only I as the webmaster have knowledge of.
Please note, that in this post “I” refers to the embodiment of one of the avatars of the Chosen Ones, known as “DJ Hadoken”. I, DJ Hadoken 7, am not the same DJ Hadoken that created this website, nor the same DJ Hadoken that succeeded him, who was known as “DJ Hadoken Exlamparaaghis”. Nor I am even the same as the four other DJ Hadokens that came after the Exlamparaaghis version. But that’s all a story for another post.
For now, just remember that “I” in this post refers to the collective actions of the avatar known as “DJ Hadoken”, and not any single DJ Hadoken, specifically.
Before this current blog, the website underwent four major “makeovers” or “overhauls”. So four “incarnations”, so to say. The first two incarnations were primarily HTML-based and we would make updates to The Funk by manually editing HTML files. I say “primarily” because during the second incarnation we eventually switched to a simple PHP-based system for The Funk (the rest was all still pure HTML).
Besides the main website, we also had a message board that had two major incarnations. Three if you count one that I set up later that hardly anybody ended up using. Oh yes, and there was a guest book in the earliest days that we used to recruit for The War Against Middle-earth. But that vanished at some point, sadly.
The first message board we used was on a free service. Since it was free, the posts would eventually be deleted. So when the main website was moved to paid hosting (the birth of RIAfunk.com) we started to use a more “sophisticated” self-hosted message board (a.k.a. The RIAfunk.com Forums).
The combination of the second incarnation of the main website running on RIAfunk.com + the “sophisticated” RIAfunk.com Forums message board worked pretty good for the most part. But the look and the HTML-aspect of RIAfunk.com was really antiquated, even by early 2000’s standards. And then The Funk broke.
So that’s when the third “overhaul” happened and when most of the trouble began. RIAfunk.com had been switched over to a more “modern” blog-style system that used a similar backend as the RIAfunk.com Forums. And even though the third incarnation of the main website is still my favorite in terms of aesthetics and usability, it was prone to being spammed, as I would eventually learn.
The RIAfunk.com Forums would also get spammed from time to time, but there were ways to implement counter-measures built-in and the admins could also help combat it to some degree.
The blog and the forums would regularly need to be updated, or else risk being hit with more spam. Not only that, but the PHP version of the website would need to be adjusted through the hosting provider to properly run the blog and forums together.
As a college student with time to spare, it was tedious but easy to keep up with the various updates and spam mitigation. But after college, life happened and lack of free time meant that the maintenance of the website started to go downhill. Not only that, but the emergence of modern-day “social media” stole everybody’s attention away from the website.
The “nails in the coffin” started to get hammered in, I would say, in the mid 2010’s. By that point, I had been forced to essentially lock down the forums due to spam attacks on the board and admin e-mails. The blog was also getting spammed, but only on the backend. Even though commenting was disabled for non-registered users, the spambots were using some workaround to leave comments that nobody could see. Only I could see them because they would show up in the the comment approval list and database.
The quality of service from the hosting provider was also becoming worse and worse. So things like the latest PHP versions and necessary features were not being implemented.
The final “nail in the coffin” occurred in 2019, when I started to receive notification e-mails from a certain-major-search-provider that rhymes with Mcdougal about various security issues related to the old versions of various things running on the website.
I decided at this point that the website needed another “overhaul”. I knew that I needed something automated if I was to keep the site alive and put an end to the incessant spam. I couldn’t keep the blog up as it was because the database was so bloated with spam and I did not have time to clean it up and deal with it. And the forums, even though they were essentially locked down, were still live but a security risk because of aging software and lack of upkeep.
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now back to the blog...
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now back to the blog...
But then, even though I did get WordPress running, the hosting provider that I was using was so crappy by this point that it ran slowly and was prone to crashing. Despite it running so crappily, the WordPress site had automated updates and better security, so I was able to put an end to the incessant spam. Unfortunately, it was so hard to use that I was only able to throw together a bare-bones website.
So that crappy WordPress one became “the fourth incarnation” of the website. It was so crappy that one time an automated update failed and the website became a blank page for half a year or even more before I eventually noticed.
Even though the past incarnations of the website vanished online, I have most of it backed up and running on a local server. This winter break I finally got around to cleaning out the spam from the blog’s database. I couldn’t leave it as it was because it was so bloated that it ran slow, even locally. It took me about 3 days to delete about 70,000 spam comments. It took me so long because even though there are ways to quickly purge databases, I didn’t want to risk unintentionally breaking things and I did not want to accidentally delete legitimate comments by humans, so I chose to do it manually.
So that’s the gist of how the website as everybody knew it vanished from one day to the next. Of course, that’s not the entirety of “what happened”. And even in this post I’ve skipped over some “important” (depending on how much you care) website-related details.
As I mentioned in my last post, I’ll elaborate gradually through future updates.
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