Here’s the explanation I received from Boardhost when I asked them what happened to the site. It’s long and detailed, but it might answer some questions – or raise a few.
 
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Today, October 21, a pair of critical vulnerabilities in PHP, the programming language that powers your forum software, were publicly announced. These vulnerabilities, collectively known as PHP2Shell, could allow attackers to execute malicious code on affected servers. The severity of this issue has prompted an urgent response from security organizations worldwide. The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has advised organizations to apply security updates immediately or take affected systems offline until they can be properly secured.

You can read the NSA's advisory here:
https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/Press-Releases-Statements/Press-Release-View/Article/4630238/nsa-advisory-php-updates/
PHP is one of the most widely used technologies on the internet, powering approximately 69% of websites whose server-side programming language is known. The scope and severity of these vulnerabilities make this a particularly serious security event for website operators and
hosting providers. As soon as we learned of the vulnerability today, we began working to secure the server hosting your forums. Our priority was to protect our customers and their data by addressing the vulnerability as quickly as possible.

During this work, a memory-related defect in the server became apparent, and we needed to reboot the server. Unfortunately, the server failed to recover and would not boot successfully after the restart.

We are now working to restore service and replace the defective hardware. We will also ensure that the required PHP security updates are applied. This hardware failure has unfortunately complicated our
response to an already serious security issue, and we are deeply sorry for the resulting disruption.
 
While the affected server remains offline, its web-facing forum services cannot receive the requests needed to exploit these PHP vulnerabilities. Keeping the affected service offline also prevents us from exposing it while we work on recovery and security updates.

Our immediate priorities are to restore the server infrastructure, replace the defective hardware, recover the affected forum services, and apply and verify the necessary PHP security updates. We are working to restore access as soon as we can do so safely and are hoping that will be able to occur in the next several hours. We know that an outage is disruptive, especially for communities that rely on their forums every day. We do not take that responsibility lightly and appreciate your
patience.

To riff on some classic lyrics, you don't know what you've got til it's down.

Glad the big yellow board is back. Thanks for the update RA! 🎙️😁

Last edited by betaylored (October 21, 2026 10:53 pm)

Listener wrote:

Thank you, RA!  I always look forward to reading these posts.  Also, you mentioned walking your dog...when did you get the new one?  So happy for you!

When my last dog passed a year ago August, I wasn't sure I was going to get a new one - I just couldn't go through that loss again. But everyone told me I would and they were right. I just could not live without one. 

In the end, I adopted Sunny, a beautiful border collie mix who came all the way from Korea! We picked him up at the airport last November and he's become the toast of the entire neighbourhood ever since.

Everyone knows and loves this lovable little boy and it's not unusual for us to be walking down the street and a passing driver will roll down their window and shout "Hi Sunny!", then speed off. I have to confess I'm not always even sure who they are, but they seem to know him!

He's the cutest and most gentle, laid back animal I've ever seen and I can't tell you how grateful I am I took that leap of faith. Thanks for asking about him. A proud dad is always happy to show off his boy!

Congratulations on the new pupper, RA! Well, not so new by now. He is a handsome boy!

Yes, Sunny is a very handsome boy!  He also has loving eyes.  I know you both love each other.  Enjoy!!